TheBantu peoples are anindigenousethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct nativeAfricanethnic groups who speakBantu languages. The languages are native to countries spread over a vast area from West Africa, to Central Africa, Southeast Africa and into Southern Africa. Bantu people also inhabit southern areas ofNortheast African states.^[1][2]

Bantu

Approximate distribution of Bantu peoples divided into zones according to theGuthrie classification of Bantu languages
Total population
350 million
Regions with significant populations
Central Africa Southern Africa East Africa Southeast Africa SouthernSomalia
Languages
Bantu languages(over 535) English ·French ·Portuguese ·Afrikaans ·Spanish ·Arabic
Religion
MostlyChristianity (Catholic ·Protestant) Minorities:Islam · NativeBantu religions

There are several hundred Bantu languages. Depending on the definition of"language" or "dialect", it is estimated that there are between 440 and 680 distinct languages.^[3] The total number of speakers is in the hundreds of millions, ranging at roughly 350 million in the mid-2010s (roughly 30% of thepopulation of Africa, or roughly 5% ofthe total world population).^[4] About 90 million speakers (2015), divided into some 400 ethnic or tribal groups, are found in theDemocratic Republic of the Congo alone.

The larger of the individual Bantu groups have populations of several million, e.g. theBaganda^[5] people ofUganda (5.5 million as of 2014), theShona ofZimbabwe (17.6 million as of 2020), theZulu ofSouth Africa (14.2 million as of 2016^[update]), theLuba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (28.8 million as of 2010^[update]), theSukuma ofTanzania (10.2 million as of 2016^[update]), theKikuyu ofKenya (8.1 million as of 2019^[update]), theXhosa people of Southern Africa (9.6 million as of 2011), batswana of Southern Africa (8.2 Million as of 2020) and thePedi of South Africa (7 million as of 2018).

Abantu is the Ndebele, Swazi, Xhosa and Zulu word for people. It is the plural of the word 'umuntu', meaning 'person', and is based on the stem '-ntu', plus the plural prefix 'aba'.^[6]

In linguistics, the wordBantu, for the language families and its speakers, is an artificial term based on the reconstructedProto-Bantu term for"people" or "humans". It was first introduced into modern academia (asBâ-ntu) byWilhelm Bleek in 1857 or 1858 and popularised in hisComparative Grammar of 1862.^[7] The name was said to be coined to represent the word for "people" in loosely reconstructed Proto-Bantu, from the pluralnoun class prefix*ba- categorizing "people", and theroot*ntʊ̀ - "some (entity), any" (e.g. Xhosa umntu "person" abantu "people", Zulu, Ndebele and Swaziumuntu "person",abantu "people").

There is no native term for the people who speak Bantu languages because they are not anethnic group. People speaking Bantu languages refer to their languages by ethnic endonyms, which did not have an indigenous concept prior to European contact for the larger ethnolinguistic phylum named by 19th-century European linguists. Bleek's coinage was inspired by the anthropological observation of groups self-identifying as "people" or "the true people".^[8] That is, idiomatically the reflexes of *bantʊ in the numerous languages often have connotations of personal character traits as encompassed under the values system ofubuntu, also known ashunhu inChishona orbotho inSesotho, rather than just referring to all human beings.^[9]

Theroot in Proto-Bantu is reconstructed as*-ntʊ́. Versions of the wordBantu (that is, the root plus the class 2 noun class prefix*ba-) occur in all Bantu languages: for example, asbantu inKikongo,Kituba,Tshiluba andKiluba;watu inSwahili;ŵanthu inTumbuka;anthu inChichewa;batu inLingala;bato inDuala;abanto inGusii;andũ inKamba andKikuyu;abantu inKirundi,Lusoga,Zulu,Xhosa,Runyoro andLuganda;wandru inShingazidja;abantru inMpondo andNdebele;bãthfu inPhuthi;bantfu inSwati andBhaca;banhu inkisukuma;banu inLala;vanhu inShona andTsonga;batho inSesotho,Tswana andSepedi;antu inMeru;andu inEmbu;vandu in someLuhya dialects;vhathu inVenda andbhandu inNyakyusa.

Within the fierce debate among linguists about the word "Bantu", Seidensticker (2024) indicates that there has been a "profound conceptual trend in which a "purely technical [term] without any non-linguistic connotations was transformed into a designation referring indiscriminately to language, culture, society, and race"."^[10]

Bantu languages derive from the Proto-Bantu reconstructed language, estimated to have been spoken about 4,000 to 3,000 years ago inWest/Central Africa (the area of modern-day Cameroon). They were supposedly spread across Central,East andSouthern Africa in the so-calledBantu expansion, comparatively rapid dissemination taking roughly two millennia and dozens of human generations during the 1st millennium BCE and the 1st millennium CE.^[11]

Scientists from the Institut Pasteur and the CNRS, together with a broad international consortium, retraced the migratory routes of the Bantu populations, which were previously a source of debate. The scientists used data from a vast genomic analysis of more than 2,000 samples taken from individuals in 57 populations throughoutSub-Saharan Africa to trace the Bantu expansion. During a wave of expansion that began 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, Bantu-speaking populations – some 310 million people as of 2023 – gradually left their original homeland West-Central Africa and travelled to the eastern and southern regions of the African continent.^[12][13]

During the Bantu expansion, Bantu-speaking peoples absorbed or displaced many earlier inhabitants, with only a few modern peoples such asPygmy groups in Central Africa, theHadza people in northern Tanzania, and variousKhoisan populations across southern Africa remaining in existence into the era of European contact.^[14] Archaeological evidence attests to their presence in areas subsequently occupied by Bantu speakers. Researchers have demonstrated that the Khoisan of the Kalahari are remnants of a huge ancestral population that may have been the most populous group on the planet prior to the Bantu expansion.^[14] Biochemist Stephan Schuster of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore and colleagues found that the Khoisan population began a drastic decline when the Bantu farmers spread through Africa 4,000 years ago.^[14]

Before the Bantu expansion had been definitively traced starting from their origins in the region between Cameroon and Nigeria,^[18] two main scenarios of the Bantu expansion were hypothesized: an early expansion to Central Africa and a single origin of the dispersal radiating from there,^[19] or an early separation into an eastward and a southward wave of dispersal, with one wave moving across theCongo Basin toward East Africa, and another moving south along the African coast and theCongo River system toward Angola.^[20]

Genetic analysis shows a significant clustered variation of genetic traits among Bantu language speakers by region, suggesting admixture from prior local populations. Bantu speakers of South Africa (Xhosa, Venda) showed substantial levels of the SAK and Western African Bantu AACs and low levels of the East African Bantu AAC (the latter is also present in Bantu speakers from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda). The results indicate distinct East African Bantu migration into southern Africa and are consistent with linguistic and archeological evidence of East African Bantu migration from an area west of Lake Victoria and the incorporation of Khoekhoe ancestry into several of the Southeast Bantu populations ~1500 to 1000 years ago.^[21]

Bantu-speaking migrants would have also interacted with someAfro-Asiatic outlier groups in the southeast (mainlyCushitic),^[22][23] as well asNilotic andCentral Sudanic speaking groups.

According to the early-split scenario as hypothesized in the 1990s, the southward dispersal had reached theCongo rainforest by about 1500 BCE and the southern savannas by 500 BC, while the eastward dispersal reached theGreat Lakes by 1000 BCE, expanding further from there as the rich environment supported dense populations. Possible movements by small groups to the southeast from the Great Lakes region could have been more rapid, with initial settlements widely dispersed near the coast and near rivers, because of comparatively harsh farming conditions in areas farther from water. Recent archeological and linguistic evidence about population movements suggests that pioneering groups had reached parts of modernKwaZulu-Natal in South Africa sometime prior to the 3rd century CE along the coast and the modernNorthern Cape by 500 CE.^[24]

Cattle terminology in use amongst the relatively few modern Bantupastoralist groups suggests that the acquisition of cattle may have been fromCentral Sudanic,Kuliak andCushitic-speaking neighbors.^[25] Linguistic evidence also indicates that the customs of milking cattle were also directly modeled from Cushitic cultures in the area.^[26] Cattle terminology in southern African Bantu languages differs from that found among more northerly Bantu-speaking peoples. One recent suggestion is that Cushitic speakers had moved south earlier and interacted with the most northerly of Khoisan speakers who acquired cattle from them and that the earliest arriving Bantu speakers, in turn, got their initial cattle from Cushitic-influenced Khwe-speaking people. Under this hypothesis, larger later Bantu-speaking immigration subsequently displaced or assimilated that southernmost extension of the range of Cushitic speakers.^[27][28]

Based on dental evidence, Irish (2016) concluded:Proto-Bantu peoples may have originated in the western region of theSahara, amid theKiffian period atGobero, and may have migrated southward, from the Sahara into various parts ofWest Africa (e.g.,Benin,Cameroon,Ghana,Nigeria,Togo), as a result ofdesertification of the Green Sahara in 7000 BCE.^[29] From Nigeria and Cameroon,agricultural Proto-Bantu peoples began tomigrate, and amid migration, diverged into East Bantu peoples (e.g.,Democratic Republic of Congo) and West Bantu peoples (e.g., Congo,Gabon) between 2500 BCE and 1200 BCE.^[29] Irish (2016) also viewsIgbo people andYoruba people as being possibly back-migrated Bantu peoples.^[29]

Between the 9th and 15th centuries, Bantu-speaking states began to emerge in the Great Lakes region and in the savanna south of the Central African rainforests. TheMonomotapa kings built theGreat Zimbabwe complex, a civilisation ancestral to the Shona people.^[30] Comparable sites in Southern Africa includeBumbusi in Zimbabwe andManyikeni in Mozambique.

From the 12th century onward, the processes of state formation amongst Bantu peoples increased in frequency. This was the result of several factors such as a denser population (which led to more specialized divisions of labor, including military power while making emigration more difficult); technological developments in economic activity; and new techniques in the political-spiritual ritualisation of royalty^[vague] as the source of national strength and health.^[31] Examples of such Bantu states include: theKingdom of Kongo,Anziku Kingdom,Kingdom of Ndongo, theKingdom of Matamba theKuba Kingdom, theLunda Empire, theLuba Empire,Barotse Empire,^[32][33]Kazembe Kingdom,Mbunda Kingdom,Yeke Kingdom,Kasanje Kingdom,Empire of Kitara,Butooro,Bunyoro,Buganda,Busoga,Rwanda,Burundi,Ankole, theKingdom of Mpororo, theKingdom of Igara, theKingdom of Kooki, theKingdom of Karagwe,Swahili city states, theMutapa Empire, theZulu Kingdom, theNdebele Kingdom,Mthethwa Empire,Tswana city states,Mapungubwe,Kingdom of Eswatini, theKingdom of Butua,Maravi,Danamombe,Khami,Naletale,Kingdom of Zimbabwe^[34] and theRozwi Empire.^[35]

On the coastal section of East Africa, a mixed Bantu community developed through contact with Muslim Arab andPersian traders,Zanzibar being an important part of theIndian Ocean slave trade. TheSwahili culture that emerged from these exchanges evinces many Arab and Islamic influences not seen in traditional Bantu culture, as do the manyAfro-Arab members of the BantuSwahili people. With its original speech community centered on the coastal parts of Zanzibar, Kenya, and Tanzania – a seaboard referred to as theSwahili Coast – the Bantu Swahili language contains manyArabicloanwords as a result of these interactions.^[36] The Bantu migrations, and centuries later the Indian Ocean slave trade, brought Bantu influence toMadagascar,^[37] theMalagasy people showing Bantu admixture, and theirMalagasy language Bantu loans.^[38] Toward the 18th and 19th centuries, the flow ofZanj slaves from Southeast Africa increased with the rise of theSultanate of Zanzibar. With the arrival of European colonialists, the Zanzibar Sultanate came into direct trade conflict and competition with Portuguese and other Europeans along the Swahili Coast, leading eventually to the fall of the Sultanate and the end of slave trading on the Swahili Coast in the mid-20th century.

In the 1920s, relatively liberal South Africans, missionaries, and the native African intelligentsia began to use the term "Bantu" in preference to "Native". AfterWorld War II, theNational Party governments adopted that usage officially, while the growing African nationalist movement and its liberal allies turned to the term "African" instead, so that "Bantu" became identified with the policies ofapartheid. By the 1970s this so discredited "Bantu" as an ethnic-racial designation that the apartheid government switched to the term "Black" in its official racial categorizations, restricting it to Bantu-speakingAfricans, at about the same time that theBlack Consciousness Movement led bySteve Biko and others were defining "Black" to mean all non-European South Africans (Bantus, Khoisan,Coloureds andIndians). In modern South Africa, the word's connection to apartheid has become so discredited that it is only used in its original linguistic meaning.^[6]

Examples of South African usages of "Bantu" include:

1. One of South Africa's politicians of recent times, General Bantubonke Harrington Holomisa (Bantubonke is acompound noun meaning "all the people"), is known asBantu Holomisa.
2. The South African apartheid governments originally gave the name "bantustans" to the eleven rural reserve areas intended for nominal independence to deny indigenous Bantu South Africans citizenship. "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 nounubuntu, humanity or humaneness, is derived regularly from the Nguni noun stem-ntu in Xhosa, Zulu and Ndebele. In Swati the stem is-ntfu and the noun isbuntfu.
4. In the Sotho–Tswana languages of Southern Africa,batho is the cognate term to Nguniabantu, illustrating that such cognates need not actually look like the-ntu root exactly. The earlyAfrican National Congress had a newspaper calledAbantu-Batho from 1912 to 1933, which carried columns written in English, Zulu, Sotho, and Xhosa.

• 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.ISBN 0-300-07280-5.
• 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

  This article incorporates text from a publication now in thepublic domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). "Hottentots".Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.