Bantu Expansion

The Bantu expansion or Bantu migration was a millennia-long series of migrations of speakers of the original proto-Bantu language group. The primary evidence for this great expansion, one of the largest in human history, has been linguistic, that is that the languages spoken in sub-Equatorial Africa are remarkably similar to each other, to the degree that it is unlikely that they began diverging from each other more than three thousand years ago. Attempts to trace the exact route of the expansion, to correlate it with archaeological evidence, and more recently, with genetic evidence, have not been conclusive, thus many aspects of the expansion remain in doubt or are highly contested.

The linguistic core of the Bantu family of languages, a branch of the Niger–Congo language family, was located in the region of modern Cameroon and Eastern Nigeria. From this core, expansion began about three thousand years ago, with one stream going more or less east into East Africa, and other streams going south along the African coast of Gabon, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Angola, or inland along the many south to north flowing rivers of the Congo River system. The expansion eventually reached South Africa probably as recently as 300 C.E.

Initially archaeologists believed that they could find archaeological similarities in the ancient cultures of the region that the Bantu were held to have traversed; while linguists, classifying the languages and creating a genealogical table of relationships believed they could reconstruct both material culture elements, new crops and the like. They believed that the expansion was caused by the development of agriculture, the making of ceramics and the use of iron, which permitted new ecological zones to be exploited. In 1966 Roland Oliver published an influential article presenting these correlations as a reasonable hypothesis. They pushed out or absorbed the hunter-forager Khoisan, who formerly inhabited these areas. Meanwhile in Eastern and Southern Africa, Bantu-speakers adopted livestock husbandry from other peoples they encountered, and in turn passed it to hunter-foragers. Herding practices reached the far south several centuries before Bantu-speaking migrants did. Archaeological, linguistic, genetic and environmental evidence all support the conclusion that the Bantu expansion was one of the most significant human migrations and cultural transformations within the past few thousand years.