Map showing the approximate distribution of Bantu (dark yellow) vs. other Niger-Congo languages (light yellow). The Niger-Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa 's largest in terms of geographical area number of speakers and number

Bantu is the name of a large category of African languages. It also is used as a general label for over 400 ethnic groups in Sub-Saharan Africa, from Cameroon across Central Africa and Eastern Africa to Southern Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is a geographical term used to describe the area of the African continent which lies south of the Sahara, or those African countries The Republic of Cameroon is a unitary republic of central and western Africa. Central Africa is a core Region of the African Continent often considered to include Burundi, the Central African Republic, Chad East Africa is the Easternmost Region of the African Continent. Southern Africa is the Southernmost Region of the African Continent, variably defined by Geography or Geopolitics. These peoples share a common language family sub-group, the Bantu languages, and broad ancestral culture, but Bantu languages as a whole are as diverse as Indo-European languages. List of language familiesA language family is a group of Languages related by descent from a common ancestor called the Proto-language of that family The Bantu languages (technically Narrow Bantu languages) constitute a grouping belonging to the Niger-Congo family

Definition

"Bantu" means "people" in many Bantu languages, along with similar sounding cognates. Cognates in Linguistics are words that have a common origin They may occur within a language such as shirt and skirt as two English words descended from 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. Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek ( March 8, 1827 - August 17, 1875) was a German linguist. Perhaps the most salient was the organization of many parts of speech in concordance with a set of noun categories, by means of inflected prefixes. In Linguistics, grammatical genders, sometimes also called Noun classes are classes of nouns reflected in the behavior of associated words every noun must belong A prefix is a type of Affix attached to a stem which modifies the meaning of that stem Thus in isiZulu, a paradigmatic case for Bleek, the noun root -ntu is found in nouns such as umuntu (person), abantu (people), ubuntu (quality of being human, humaneness), and verbs and adjectives describing the nouns agree with them: Umuntu omkhulu uhamba ngokushesha (The big person walks quickly), Abantu abakhulu bahamba ngokushesha (The big people walk quickly). Zulu (called isiZulu in Zulu is a Language of the Zulu people with about 10 million speakers the vast majority (over 95% of whom live in South The word paradigm ( Greek:παράδειγμα (paradigmacomposite from para- and the verb δείχνυμι "to show" as a whole -roughly- meaning "example" The root is the primary lexical unit of a Word, which carries the most significant aspects of semantic content and cannot be reduced into smaller constituents Ubuntu, ùbúntú is an Ethic or humanist Philosophy focusing on people's allegiances and relations with each other In Languages agreement is a form of cross-reference between different parts of a sentence or phrase

Bleek's basic thesis of linguistic affinity has been confirmed by numerous researchers using the comparative method. The comparative method (in Comparative linguistics) is a technique used by linguists to demonstrate genetic relationships between Languages It aims to prove

Origins

1. = 3000 - 1500 BC origin
2 = ca. 1500 BC first migrations
        2. a = Eastern Bantu, 2. b = Western Bantu
3. = 1000 - 500 BC Urewe nuclus of Eastern Bantu
4. The Urewe culture developed and spread in and around the the Lake Victoria region of Africa during the African Iron Age. - 7. southward advance
9. = 500 BC - 0 Congo nucleus
10. = 0 - 1000 AD last phase ^{[1] [2] [3]}

Early iron age findings in eastern and southern Africa

Current scholarly understanding places the ancestral proto-Bantu homeland near the southwestern modern boundary of Nigeria and Cameroon ca. 5000 years ago (3000 BC), and regards the Bantu languages as a branch of the Niger-Congo language family^[4]. The Niger-Congo languages constitute one of the world's major language families, and Africa 's largest in terms of geographical area number of speakers and number List of language familiesA language family is a group of Languages related by descent from a common ancestor called the Proto-language of that family This view represents a resolution of debates in the 1960s over competing theories advanced by Joseph Greenberg and Malcolm Guthrie, in favor of refinements of Greenberg's theory. Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28 1915 – May 7 2001 was a prominent and controversial linguist and Africanist anthropologist known for his work in both typology Malcolm Guthrie ( February 10, 1903 &ndash November 22, 1972) professor of Bantu languages is known primarily for his classification Based on wide comparisons including non-Bantu languages, Greenberg argued that Proto-Bantu, the hypothetical ancestor of the Bantu languages, had strong ancestral affinities with a group of languages spoken in Southeastern Nigeria. Nigeria, officially named the Federal Republic of Nigeria, is a federal Constitutional republic comprising thirty-six states and one Federal He proposed that Bantu languages had spread east and south from there, to secondary centers of further dispersion, over hundreds of years.

Using a different comparative method focused more exclusively on relationships among Bantu languages, Guthrie argued for a single central African dispersal point spreading at a roughly equal rate in all directions. Subsequent research on loanwords for adaptations in agriculture and animal husbandry and on the wider Niger-Congo language family rendered that thesis untenable. In the 1990s Jan Vansina proposed a modification of Greenberg's ideas, in which dispersions from secondary and tertiary centers resembled Guthrie's central node idea, but from a number of regional centers rather than just one, creating linguistic clusters. Jan Vansina (b Antwerp, Belgium, September 14, 1929) is a historian and anthropologist specializing in Africa ^[5]

Before the expansion of farming and herding peoples, including those speaking Bantu languages, Africa south of the equator was populated by neolithic hunting and foraging peoples. The Neolithic (from Greek νεολιθικός — neolithikos from νέος neos, "new" + λίθος lithos Some of them were ancestral to modern Central African forest peoples (so-called Pygmies) who now speak Bantu languages. Pygmies (singular Pygmy) refers to a member of any human group whose adult males grow to less than 150 cm (4 feet 11 inches in average height or less than 155 cm Others were proto-Khoisan-speaking peoples, whose few modern hunter-forager and linguistic descendants today occupy the arid regions around the Kalahari desert. The Khoisan languages (also Khoesaan languages) are the indigenous languages of southern and eastern Africa; in southern Africa their speakers are the Khoi Many more Khoekhoe and San descendants have a Coloured identity in South Africa and Namibia, speaking Afrikaans and English. In the South African Namibian Zambian Botswanan and Zimbabwean context the term Coloured (also known as Bruinmense Afrikaans is an Indo-European language, derived from 17th century Dutch and classified as Low Franconian Germanic, mainly spoken in English is a West Germanic language originating in England and is the First language for most people in the United Kingdom, the United States The small Hadza and Sandawe-speaking populations in Tanzania, whose languages are proposed by many to have a distant relationship to Khoekhoe and San languages (although the hypothesis that the Khoisan languages are a single family is disputed by many, and the name is simply used for convenience), comprise the other modern hunter-forager remnant in Africa. Hadza is a Language isolate spoken by fewer than a thousand people along the shores of Lake Eyasi in Tanzania. Over a period of many centuries, most hunting-foraging peoples were displaced and absorbed by incoming Bantu-speaking communities, as well as by Ubangian, Nilotic and Central Sudanic language-speakers in North Central and Eastern Africa. While earliest archaeological evidence of farming and herding in today's Bantu language areas often is presumed to reflect spread of Bantu-speaking communities, it need not always do so. ^[6]

Bantu expansion

Main article: Bantu expansion

The Bantu expansion was a millennia-long series of physical migrations, a diffusion of language and knowledge out into and in from neighboring populations, and a creation of new societal groups involving inter-marriage among communities and small groups moving to communities and small groups moving to new areas. The Bantu expansion was a millennia-long series of migrations of speakers of the original proto- Bantu language group Bantu-speakers developed novel methods of agriculture and metalworking which allowed people to colonize new areas with widely varying ecologies in greater densities than hunting and foraging permitted. Agriculture refers to the production of goods through the growing of plants and fungi and the raising of domesticated Animals The study of agriculture Metalworking is craft and practice of working with Metals to create individual parts assemblies or large scale structures Meanwhile in Eastern and Southern Africa Bantu-speakers adopted livestock husbandry from other peoples they encountered, and in turn passed it to hunter-foragers, so that herding reached the far south several centuries before Bantu-speaking migrants did. Archaeological, linguistic and genetic evidence all support the idea that the Bantu expansion was one of the most significant human migrations and cultural transformations within the past few thousand years. Archaeology, archeology, or archæology (from Greek grc ἀρχαιολογία archaiologia – grc ἀρχαῖος archaīos Linguistics is the scientific study of Language, encompassing a number of sub-fields Genetics (from Ancient Greek grc-Latn genetikos, “genitive” and that from grc-Latn genesis, “origin” a discipline of Biology, is

It is unclear when exactly the spread of Bantu-speakers began from their core area as hypothesized ca. 5000 years ago. By 3500 years ago (1500 B. C. ) in the west, Bantu-speaking communities had reached the great Central African rainforest, and by 2500 year ago (500 B. C. ) pioneering groups had emerged into the savannahs to the south, in what are now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Zambia. A savanna or savannah is a Tropical or Subtropical Grassland or Woodland Ecosystem. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (République démocratique du Congo often referred to as DR Congo, DRC or RDC, and formerly known or referred to Angola, officially the Republic of Angola (República de Angola Pronounced ʁɛˈpublikɐ dɨ ɐ̃ˈgɔlɐ Repubilika ya Ngola is a country in south-central The Republic of Zambia (ˈzæmbɪə is a Landlocked country in Southern Africa. Another stream of migration, moving east, by 3000 years ago (1000 B. C. ) was creating a major new population center near the Great Lakes of East Africa, where a rich environment supported a dense population. Movements by small groups to the southeast from the Great Lakes region were more rapid, with initial settlements widely dispersed near the coast and near rivers, due to comparatively harsh farming conditions in areas further from water. Pioneering groups had reached modern KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa by A. D. 300 along the coast, and the modern Northern Province (encompassed within the former province of the Transvaal) by A. For the Russian theme park see Transvaal Park. The Transvaal (Afrikaans lit D. 500. ^[7]

Between the 13th and 15th centuries relatively powerful Bantu-speaking states on a scale larger than local chiefdoms began to emerge, in the Great Lakes region, in the savannah south of the Central African rainforest, and on the Zambezi river where the Monomatapa kings built the famous Great Zimbabwe complex. The Great Zimbabwe, or "stone buildings" is the name given to hundreds of great stone Ruins spread out over a 500 km² (200 square mile area within the modern-day Such processes of state-formation occurred with increasing frequency from the 16th century onward. They were probably due to denser population, which led to more specialized divisions of labor, including military power, while making emigration more difficult, to increased trade among African communities and with European, Swahili and Arab traders on the coasts, to technological developments in economic activity, and to new techniques in the political-spiritual ritualization of royalty as the source of national strength and health. ^[8]

The use of the term "Bantu" in South Africa

Main article: Bantu-speaking peoples of South Africa

In the 1920s relatively liberal white South Africans, missionaries and the small black intelligentsia began to use the term "Bantu" in preference to "Native" and more derogatory terms (such as "Kaffir") to refer collectively to Bantu-speaking South Africans. Black South Africans were at times officially called " Bantu " by the Apartheid Regime. This article refers to the use of the word Kaffir in its historical sense as a term to describe black South African languages and cultures After World War II, the racialist National Party governments adopted that usage officially, while the growing African nationalist movement and its liberal white allies turned to the term "African" instead, so that "Bantu" became identified with the policies of apartheid. World War II, or the Second World War, (often abbreviated WWII) was a global military conflict which involved a majority of the world's nations, including The National Party ( Afrikaans: Nasionale Party) (with its members sometimes known as Nationalists or Nats) was the governing party of By the 1970s this so discredited "Bantu" as an ethno-racial designation that the apartheid government switched to the term "Black" in its official racial categorizations, restricting it to Bantu-speaking Africans, at about the same time that the Black Consciousness Movement led by Steve Biko and others were defining "Black" to mean all racially oppressed South Africans (Africans, Coloureds and Indians). The Black Consciousness Movement ( BCM was a Grassroots anti- Apartheid activist movement that emerged in South Africa in the mid-1960s out of Stephen Bantu Biko December 1946 &ndash 12 September 1977 was a noted anti-[[apartheid] activist in South Africa in the 1960s and early The majority of South Africa's Asian population is Indian in origin many of them descended from indentured workers brought to work on the sugar plantations of the eastern coastal area then known

Examples of South African usages of "Bantu" include:

1. One of South Africa's politicians of recent times, General Bantubonke Harrington Holomisa (Bantubonke is a compound noun meaning "all the people"), is known as Bantu Holomisa. In Linguistics, a compound is a Lexeme (less precisely a Word) that consists of more than one stem. Bantubonke Harrington Holomisa (born 1955-07-25 in Mqanduli, Eastern Cape.
2. The South African apartheid governments originally gave the name "bantustans" to the eleven rural reserve areas intended for a spurious, ersatz independence to deny Africans South African citizenship. A bantustan or more commonly black african homeland or simply homeland, was territory set aside for black inhabitants of South Africa and South-West "Bantustan" originally reflected an analogy to the various ethnic "-stans" of Western and Central Asia. Again association with apartheid discredited the term, and the South African government shifted to the politically appealing but historically deceptive term "ethnic homelands". Meanwhile the anti-apartheid movement persisted in calling the areas bantustans, to drive home their political illegitimacy.
3. The abstract noun ubuntu, humanity or humaneness, is derived regularly from the Nguni noun stem -ntu in isiXhosa, isiZulu and siNdebele. Nguni languages are mostly spoken by Nguni people, which are group of clans and nations living in south-east Africa In siSwati the stem is -ntfu and the noun is buntfu.
4. In the Sotho-Tswana languages of southern Africa, batho is the cognate term to Nguni abantu, illustrating that such cognates need not actually look like the -ntu root exactly. The Sotho-Tswana language group is a group of closely related Bantu languages spoken in Southern Africa including Tswana ( Setswana) Northern Sotho The early African National Congress of South Africa had a newspaper called Abantu-Batho from 1912-1933, which carried columns in English, isiZulu, Sesotho, and isiXhosa. The African National Congress (ANC has been South Africa 's governing party supported by its Tripartite alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions

Bibliography

• Christopher Ehret, An African Classical Age: Eastern and Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B. C. to A. D. 400, James Currey, London, 1998
• Christopher Ehret and Merrick Posnansky, eds. , The Archaeological and Linguistic Reconstruction of African History, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1982
• April A. Gordon and Donald L. Gordon, Understanding Contemporary Africa, Lynne Riener, London, 1996
• John M. Janzen, Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992
• James L. Newman, The Peopling of Africa: A Geographic Interpretation, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1995
• Kevin Shillington, History of Africa, 3rd ed. St. Martin's Press, New York, 2005
• Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1990
• Jan Vansina, "New linguistic evidence on the expansion of Bantu," Journal of African History 36:173-195, 1995

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)
4. ^ Erhet & Posnansky, eds. The Centre International des Civilisations Bantu ( CICIBA) is a cultural organization based in Libreville, Gabon. Jan Vansina (b Antwerp, Belgium, September 14, 1929) is a historian and anthropologist specializing in Africa Bantu, also called Batuque or Angola, is one of the major sects ( nations) of Candomblé, an Afro-American religion practised in The Somali Bantu (also called Jareer or Gosha by ethnic Somalis are a minority ethnic group in Somalia, a country largely inhabited by ethnic It is theorized that pre-historical migration of human populations began with the movement of Homo erectus out of Africa across Eurasia (1982), Newman (1995)
5. ^ Vansina (1995)
6. ^ Ehret (1998)
7. ^ Newman (1995), Ehret (1998), Shillington (2005)
8. ^ Shillington (2005)