(băn'tū') , ethnic and linguistic group of Africa, numbering about 120 million. The Bantu inhabit most of the continent S of the Congo River except the extreme southwest. The classification is primarily linguistic, and there are almost a hundred Bantu languages, including Luganda, Zulu, and Swahili. Few cultural generalizations concerning the Bantu can be made. Before the European conquest of Africa the Bantu tribes were either pastoral and warlike or agricultural and usually pacific. There were some highly developed Bantu states, including Buganda in present-day Uganda. Possibly under the fear of European encroachment, several additional Bantu states developed in the 19th cent., notably among the Zulu and the Sotho. Other well-known Bantu tribes include the Ndebele (Matabele) and the Shona. In South Africa, the term Bantu is commonly used to refer to the native African population, which was subject to the policies of apartheid.

Bibliography

See W. M. MacMillan, Bantu, Boer, and Briton (rev. ed. 1963); W. C. Willoughby, The Soul of the Bantu (1928, repr. 1970); E. J. Murphy, The Bantu Civilization of Southern Africa (1974).

Bantu is a label used in a general sense for over 400 ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa, from Cameroon, Southern Africa, Central Africa, to Eastern Africa, united by a common language family (the Bantu languages) and in many cases common customs.

Definition

"Bantu", and similar sounding cognates, means "people" in many Bantu languages. Dr. Wilhelm Bleek first used the term "Bantu" in its current sense in his 1862 book A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages, in which he hypothesized that a vast number of languages located across central, southern, eastern, and western Africa shared so many characteristics that they must be part of a single language group. This basic thesis (of linguistic affinity) has been confirmed by numerous researchers using the comparative method. On the other hand, the theory of a single ethnic group has been widely challenged since it was proposed - not least because a language may be spread by a relatively small number of human carriers.

Origins

Before the expansion of the Bantu languages and their speakers, the southern half of Africa is believed to have been populated by Pygmies and Khoisan speaking people, today occupying the arid regions around the Kalahari and the rainforest of Congo Basin; whereas Cushites, Nilotes and other people speaking Afro-Asiatic languages inhabited north-eastern and northern Africa. Northwestern Africa, the Sahara, and the Sudan were inhabited by people speaking Mande and Atlantic languages (such as the Fulani and Wolof) and other people speaking Nilo-Saharan languages.

There are two basic theories of the spread of the Bantu languages and societies. The first was advanced by Joseph Greenberg in 1963. He had analyzed and compared several hundred African languages and found that a group of languages spoken in Southeastern Nigeria were the most closely related to languages from the Bantu group. He theorized that Proto-Bantu (the hypothetical ancestor of the Bantu languages) was originally one of these languages that spread south and east over hundreds of years.

This was quickly challenged by Malcolm Guthrie who analyzed each Bantu language and found that the most stereotypical were those spoken in Zambia and in the southern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This provided the alternative theory that Bantu speakers had spread from this location in all directions.

Bantu expansion

Main article: Bantu expansion

The Bantu expansion was both a physical migration and a diffusion of language and knowledge into neighboring populations, and societal groups (usually through inter-marriage or by small groups moving to new areas). Bantu speakers developed novel methods of agriculture and metalworking which allowed people to colonize new areas in greater densities. Both linguistics and genetics support the idea that the Bantu expansion was one of the most significant human migrations and expansions within the past few thousand years.

By about 1000 AD it had reached modern day Zimbabwe and South Africa. In Zimbabwe a major southern hemisphere empire was established, with its capital at Great Zimbabwe. It controlled trading routes from South Africa to north of the Zambezi, trading gold, copper, precious stones, animal hides, ivory and metal goods with the Arab traders of the Swahili coast. By the 14th or 15th centuries the Empire had collapsed, with the city of Great Zimbabwe being abandoned. The expansion primarily ended with the clashes between the Xhosa and Boers at Graaff Reinet inn 1779.

Another theory, rather unsupported by the existing evidence, held is that the Bantu society originated from the Congo and due to factors like agriculture and trade in ivory they spread out to the north, east and the south. With slave trade the further scattered out across Africa some running from the slave traders.

The use of the term "Bantu" in South Africa

Main article: Bantu speaking peoples of South Africa

Black South Africans were at times officially called "Bantus" by the apartheid regime. The term is derived from the Zulu term for people "abantu" the plural of "umuntu." Examples of its usage are as follows:

1. One of South Africa's politicians of recent times General Bantubonke Harrington Holomisa " all the people" who is know as Bantu Holomisa .
2. The South African apartheid regime, used the term "Bantustan", to refer to the "homelands" (Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and the Ciskei).
3. The abstract noun Ubuntu is derived regularly from the Nguni noun Umuntu.

Bibliography

• J. Desmond Clark, The Prehistory of Africa, Thames and Hudson, 1970
• April A. Gordon and Donald L. Gordon, Understanding Contemporary Africa, Lynne Riener, London, 1996
• Kevin Shillington, History of Africa, St. Martin's Press, New York, 1995 (1989)

See also

• Centre International des Civilisations Bantu
• Jan Vansina
• Candomblé Bantu
• Somali Bantu
• Historical migration

References

1. ^ The Chronological Evidence for the Introduction of Domestic Stock in Southern Africa
2. ^ A Brief History of Botswana
3. ^ On Bantu and Khoisan in (Southeastern) Zambia, (in German)

Donate to Wikimedia