origin and expansion of bantu
ORIGIN AND EXPANSION OF THE BANTU
Bantu is used as a general label for the 300-600 ethnic groups in Africa who speak the Bantu languages, distributed from Cameroon east across central Africa and eastern Africa to Southern Africa. The bantu family is fragmented into hundreds of individual groups, none of them larger than a few million people (the largest being the Zulu with some 10 million).The bantu language-Swahili with its 5-10 million speakers is of super-regional importance as tens of millions fluently command it as as a second language.
The word `Bantu’, and its variations, means `the people’ or `humans’ .Versions of this word occur in all Bantu languages, for example, as `watu’ in Swahili;`batu’ in Lingala;`bato’ in Duala;`abanto’ in Gusii;`andu’ in Kikuyu;`abantu’ in Zulu,Runyakitara and Ganda;`vanhu’ in Shona and `vandu’ in some Luhya dialects.
Current scholarly understanding places the ancestral proto-bantu homeland near the southwestern modern boundary of Nigeria and Cameroon, around 4000 years ago (2000 BC),and regards the Bantu languages as a branch of the Niger-Congo family.
Knowledge of iron had made its way into West Africa by the fifth century BC, long after the region had mastered agriculture. With the knowledge of iron, they were able to make iron tools for agriculture such as hoes as well as arrows and spears which they used for hunting and warfare. The use of iron tools in crop production consequently led to rapid uincrease3 in population therefore necessitating the need to migrate in search for more land to settle on and on which to carry out agriculture.
About the time of Christ, this migration began as negroid people from the central Benue river valley around the present day border between Nigeria and Cameroon pushed south and south east into the forest of the Congo river basin. These Bantu speakers seem to have been relatively few in number perhaps only several hundreds-but they were able to move quickly through the
Bantu is used as a general label for the 300-600 ethnic groups in Africa who speak the Bantu languages, distributed from Cameroon east across central Africa and eastern Africa to Southern Africa. The bantu family is fragmented into hundreds of individual groups, none of them larger than a few million people (the largest being the Zulu with some 10 million).The bantu language-Swahili with its 5-10 million speakers is of super-regional importance as tens of millions fluently command it as as a second language.
The word `Bantu’, and its variations, means `the people’ or `humans’ .Versions of this word occur in all Bantu languages, for example, as `watu’ in Swahili;`batu’ in Lingala;`bato’ in Duala;`abanto’ in Gusii;`andu’ in Kikuyu;`abantu’ in Zulu,Runyakitara and Ganda;`vanhu’ in Shona and `vandu’ in some Luhya dialects.
Current scholarly understanding places the ancestral proto-bantu homeland near the southwestern modern boundary of Nigeria and Cameroon, around 4000 years ago (2000 BC),and regards the Bantu languages as a branch of the Niger-Congo family.
Knowledge of iron had made its way into West Africa by the fifth century BC, long after the region had mastered agriculture. With the knowledge of iron, they were able to make iron tools for agriculture such as hoes as well as arrows and spears which they used for hunting and warfare. The use of iron tools in crop production consequently led to rapid uincrease3 in population therefore necessitating the need to migrate in search for more land to settle on and on which to carry out agriculture.
About the time of Christ, this migration began as negroid people from the central Benue river valley around the present day border between Nigeria and Cameroon pushed south and south east into the forest of the Congo river basin. These Bantu speakers seem to have been relatively few in number perhaps only several hundreds-but they were able to move quickly through the