Unified regions: Migrations led to a rise of large states and bigger tribes in East Africa, e. Negative impacts. Depopulation: This was caused by the frequent attacks made by the Bantu against the people in East Africa for land through wars.
Loss of culture: Cultural absorption resulted in the loss of culture. Also, Bantu intermarrying with the non- Bantu peoples was a factor. The Bantu migration being the largest migration in history, influenced two thirds of African language. By the end of the first millennium divisions had formed. There was a difference between the rich and poor, as well as with men and women. The Bantu were the first to develop language and provide historians with an idea about Africa's civilizations.
The Bantu were also the first farmers and cattle-keepers. Who and When: Between B. Causes: The reasons for the Bantu migrations are unknown to many, but they most likely include these listed below: Drying up of the Sahara grasslands which led groups that practiced agriculture to migrate in search of new fertile land and water for farming.
First Wave: The first wave of the Bantu migration followed two paths into the rain forest and around the Congo River.
Second Wave: After the struggle of finding land for farming, Bantu groups set path towards the east coast of Southern Africa where land was better suited for farming. Positive impacts Introduction of iron working: they introduced iron-working and the use of iron tools throughout much of Africa, and when iron-smelting started, there was an increase in food production. For more than a century, historians have supported the idea of a 'Bantu Expansion' that, starting in West Africa several millennia ago, spread across the southern half of the continent.
But new research from an international team casts doubt on this version of events. It is a relatively well-known story, or at least one that African history buffs thought they knew. German scholars Wilhelm Bleek and Carl Meinhof were the first to call attention to the specific features shared by Bantu-derived languages by distinguishing them from the Xhosa language in South Africa, for instance.
American linguist — Joseph Greenberg — would go on to develop a classification system for African languages that supported the idea of a geographic expansion , while British colonial administrator — Henry Hamilton Johnston — drew up the first map outlining and dating the stages of this so-called expansion.
Bleek, who coined the term, was an avowed racist while Meinhof was a member of the Nazi party. This theory rests on the idea of a slow but continuous expansion. This version of how sub-Saharan Africa was settled, while long accepted as fact, poses a few problems, however. To a certain extent, these populations also share some genetic similarities but this is not a hard-and-fast rule: Pygmies have adopted Bantu languages yet they are not descended from the West African communities that initiated migration.
While ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to revive the initiative have been made on a regular basis. But most importantly, according to the latest findings published early this year by a multidisciplinary team of archaeologists, linguists and geneticists led by Professor Koen Bostoen — from Ghent University in Belgium — the idea of a continuous geographic expansion of Bantu-speaking peoples is downright wrong.
Since , these researchers have been studying and radiocarbon-dating pottery fragments which are among the few objects that stand the test of time recovered from sites throughout the Congo rainforest.
After analysing the vessel shape and style of decoration of the artefacts, they radiocarbon dated them. They also examined human genetic data and used the latest techniques to assess what are known as paleodemographic fluctuations over the last generations. Their conclusion: the vast majority of the pottery remains that were recovered date back to either the Early Iron Age, i. These two periods are separated by a sharp decline in human activity between and CE. Another thing is that when comparing the pottery fragments from the two periods, which date back to the Early Iron Age and Late Iron Age, respectively, the styles are completely different.
They are spoken mostly east and south of present-day Cameroon, that is, in the regions commonly known as Central Africa, Southeast Africa, and Southern Africa.
A postulated millennia-long series of migrations of speakers of the original proto-Bantu language group. The primary evidence for this expansion has been linguistic, namely that the languages spoken in sub-Equatorial Africa are remarkably similar to each other.
Its founders are descendants of the builders who constructed Great Zimbabwe. It is located in the southeast of the country, enjoying a long shoreline beside the Indian Ocean and sharing borders with three other provinces and the countries of Mozambique, Swaziland, and Lesotho. Nomadic pastoralists descended from mostly Dutch colonists, French Huguenots, and German Protestants in the Cape Colony founded in They began migrating into the interior from the areas surrounding what is now Cape Town during the late 17th century and throughout the 18th century.
The Bantu expansion is the name for a postulated millennia-long series of migrations of speakers of the original proto-Bantu language group. Attempts to trace the exact route of the expansion, to correlate it with archaeological evidence and genetic evidence, have not been conclusive. 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 adjoining region of Cameroon and Nigeria. From this core, expansion began about 3, years ago, with one stream going into East Africa, and other streams going south along the African coast of Gabon, the 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 as early as CE. It seems likely that the expansion of the Bantu-speaking people from their core region in West Africa began around BCE. Although early models posited that the early speakers were both iron-using and agricultural, archaeology has shown that they did not use iron until as late as BCE, though they were agricultural.
The western branch, not necessarily linguistically distinct, according to Christopher Ehret, followed the coast and the major rivers of the Congo system southward, reaching central Angola by around BCE.
Further east, Bantu-speaking communities had reached the great Central African rainforest, and by BCE, pioneering groups had emerged into the savannas to the south, in what are now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, and Zambia. Another stream of migration, moving east by BCE, was creating a major new population center near the Great Lakes of East Africa, where a rich environment supported a dense population.
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