The Bantu peoples are the speakers of Bantu languages, comprising several hundred ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa, spread over a vast area from Central Africa across the African Great Lakes to Southern Africa. Linguistically, the Bantu languages belong to the Southern Bantoid branch of Benue–Congo, one of the language families grouped within the Niger–Congo phylum.
The total number of Bantu languages ranges in the hundreds, depending on the definition of "language" vs. "dialect" estimated at between 440 and 680 distinct languages. The total number of Bantu speakers is in the hundreds of millions, ranging at roughly 350 million in the mid-2010s (roughly 30% of the total population of Africa, or roughly 5% of world population). About 60 million Bantu speakers (2015), divided into some 200 ethnic or tribal groups, are found in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone.
The larger of the individual Bantu groups have populations of several million, e.g. the Shona of Zimbabwe (12 million as of 2000), the Zulu of South Africa (12 million as of 2005) the Luba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (7 million as of 2010), the Sukuma of Tanzania (9 million as of 2016), or the Kikuyu of Kenya (7 million as of 2010).
Map of the major Bantu languages (shown in purple), with the non-Bantu Southern Bantoid languages indicated in violet (northwestern corner) The word Bantu for the language families and its speakers is an artificial term based on the reconstructed Proto-Bantu term for "people" or "humans". It was first introduced (as Bâ-ntu) by Wilhelm Bleek in 1857 or 1858, and popularised in his Comparative Grammar of 1862. The name was coined to represent the word for "people" in loosely reconstructed Proto-Bantu, from the plural noun class prefix *ba- categorizing "people", and the root *nt?` - "some (entity), any" (e.g. Zulu umuntu "person", abantu "people", into "thing", izinto "things").
There is no native term for the group, as populations refer to their languages by ethnic endonyms but did not have a concept for the larger ethno-linguistic phylum. Bleek's coinage was inspired by the anthropological observation of groups self-identifying as "people" or "the true people". That is, idiomatically the reflexes of *bant? in the numerous languages often have connotations of personal character traits as encompassed under the values system of ubuntu, also known as hunhu in Chishona or botho in Sesotho, rather than just referring to all human beings.
The root in Proto-Bantu is reconstructed as *-nt?. Versions of the word Bantu (that is, the root plus the class 2 noun class prefix *ba-) occur in all Bantu languages: for example, as watu in Swahili; bantu in Kikongo; anthu in Chichewa; batu in Lingala; bato in Kiluba; bato in Duala; abanto in Gusii; and? in Kamba and Kikuyu; abantu in Kirundi, Zulu, Xhosa, Runyakitara, and Ganda; wandru in Shingazidja; abantru in Mpondo and Ndebele; bãthfu in Phuthi; bantfu in Swati; banu in Lala; vanhu in Shona and Tsonga; batho in Sesotho, Tswana and Northern Sotho; antu in Meru; andu in Embu; vandu in some Luhya dialects; vhathu in Venda; bhandu in Nyakyusa; and mbaityo in Tiv.
1 = 2000–1500 BC origin 2 = ca. 1500 BC first migrations 2.a = Eastern Bantu, 2.b = Western Bantu 3 = 1000–500 BC Urewe nucleus of Eastern Bantu 4–7 = southward advance 9 = 500 BC–0 Congo nucleus 10 = 0–1000 AD last phase
Bantu languages derive from a Proto-Bantu language, estimated to have been spoken about 4,000 to 3,000 years ago in West/Central Africa (the area of modern-day Cameroon). They were supposedly spread across Central, Eastern and Southern Africa in the Bantu expansion, a rapid succession of migrations during the 1st millennium BC, in one wave moving across the Congo basin towards East Africa, in another moving south along the African coast and the Congo River system towards Angola.
The geographical origin of the Bantu expansion is somewhat open to debate. Two main scenarios are proposed, an early expansion to Central Africa, and a single origin of the migration radiating from there, or an early separation into an eastward and a southward wave of migration. Genetic analysis shows a significant clustering of Bantu peoples by region, suggesting admixture from local populations, with the Eastern Bantu forming a separate ancestral cluster, and the Southern Bantu (Venda, Xhosa) showing derivation from Western Bantu by Khoisan admixture and low levels of Eastern Bantu admixture.
According to the early-split scenario described in the 1990s, the southward migration had reached the Central African rain forest by about 1500 BC, and the southern Savannahs by 500 BC, while the eastward migration reached the Great Lakes by 1000 BC, expanding further from there, as the 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 farther from water. Pioneering groups had reached modern KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa by about AD 300 along the coast, and the modern Northern Province (encompassed within the former province of the Transvaal) by AD 500.
The Bantu peoples assimilated and/or displaced a number of earlier inhabitants that they came across, such as Pygmy and Khoisan populations in the centre and south, respectively. They also encountered some Afro-Asiatic outlier groups in the southeast (mainly Cushitic), as well as Nilo-Saharan (mainly Nilotic and Sudanic) groups.
As cattle terminology in use amongst the few modern Bantu pastoralist groups suggests, the Bantu migrants would acquire cattle from their new Cushitic neighbors. Linguistic evidence also indicates that Bantus likely borrowed the custom of milking cattle directly from Cushitic peoples in the area. Later interactions between Bantu and Cushitic peoples resulted in Bantu groups with significant Cushitic ethnic admixture, such as the Tutsi of the African Great Lakes region; and culturo-linguistic influences, such as the Herero herdsmen of southern Africa.
