How the Bantu people surged across two-thirds of Africa
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
This migration history is even more complex because the migration was in waves - Bantu who went to South Africa later migrated north again, meeting Bantu who were already there from earlier migration. You can tell this from the fact that some southern African languages have closer linguistic relationship to some East African ones, than they do to other Bantu languages in their region.
My dad (Bukusu of Western Kenya) once met a gentleman from the Venda tribe of South Africa, and they conversed in English for an hour until the South African got a phone call that he answered in Venda. My dad understood practically every word that was said on the phone, and they each discovered this tribe they'd never heard of before had more language overlap than their neighbouring Bantu tribes back home.
It's fascinating if you consider just how big an area we're talking about, and how much opportunity existed for other languages to wipe out Bantu dialects. I'm no linguist but I think Africa has a propensity for multilingualism that has kept these tribal dialects alive, and aside from DNA this gives the strongest evidence of the past migrations of Bantu people.
>My dad understood practically every word that was said on the phone
It is quite uncanny how South African languages sound like Swa. I always find it amusing.
When Mandela and Winne were in the midst of their divorce, I read an article which reported that Winnie got the matrimonial home as part of the settlement because 'the placenta of her children were buried there....' This practice is widespread in West Africa. It surprised me that it was a thing in South Africa as well and spurred my (amateur) search for other similarities in culture.
Turns out there are many : inheritance laws, burial customs,traditional government organization.
This article does a lot to explain why we are so similar. In particular, the culture and traditions of central plains dwelling Nigerian tribes (Tiv, Berom, Jukun etc) are very similar to that of the Eastern and South African Bantu (Swahili, Xhosa, Zulu)
(I am Nigerian)
First of all, it's incredible how intellectually insatiable the HN community is; I never imagined a post like this would end up on the HN's home page because of how niche it is.
I happen to speak up to 4 languages - Eng, Swahili, my native language Kikuyu and very rusty French. It may surprise you to know that when I listen to other Bantu tribes even from countries as far as South Africa, one or two words will often stick out and I might even get the context of a conversation even though it is indeed true that we Africans don't all speak the same language. As a matter of fact there thousands of languages and were it not for a language like Swahili, it might have been very difficult for a region such as East Africa - where Swahili is largely spoken - to have any sort of cohesion and communication.
Swahili emanates from a mix of Bantu languages and Arabic. When you hear greetings like 'alaikum salam', the first thing you probably think of is Islam but when I was in school - and I was brought up as a Christian(now not so much but that's another day's tale) - we'd greet our Swahili teachers that way everyday.
Lastly, there are two other families other than Bantu; Cushites and Nilotes. We have both families in Kenya. Cushites are mostly comprised of Somalis and similar tribes from neighboring Ethiopia.
Nilotes come in three sub-groups; River-Lake Nilotes, Plains Nilotes and Highlands Nilotes.
There has been a lot of hatred between the Bantu speaking communities and Nilotes in Kenya. Growing up I didn't know this. Our parents largely shielded us from negative ethnicity until the year 2007.
For those of you who remember, in 2007, it was the bloodiest post election violence (PEV) experienced in Kenya. Growing up, I had friends from other communities and never gave it much thought. In fact, my best friend and double-decker-mate in boarding school was from a Nilotic community known as Luo. However, when there was the contested election in 2007, it became apparent that there was deep rooted hatred between our communities. For those unlucky enough to live in 'cosmopolitan' areas, neighbors were turning against each other, looting and killing one another like nobody's business. I was a tad mad at myself for such naiveté - how could I not have seen it all around me was the question I asked myself. It was always there; my bringing up just shielded me from its apparent nature.
My neighbor's grandparents lived in an area surrounded by Nilotes(Kalenjins to be more specific) and when the PEV came about, their grandfather was shot with an arrow in the chest and he died a very painful death. The grandma survived as she had left earlier before things got thick. She had to relocate and they lost their land. There were countless similar stories - some more horrific than others.
I despise negative ethnicity regardless of who's doing it and I think it's incredibly myopic, just to set the record straight.
Things are relatively calm now but there's an upcoming election in August. Based on previous experience, I will take a vacation in Tanzania come election week. I will only return once things are certainly calm.
Thank you for your well articulated post. I'm Bantu also from Kenya ( Meru).
> There has been a lot of hatred between the Bantu speaking communities and Nilotes in Kenya.
Since when has this been the case? Have they been traditionally enemies or politics has succeeding in dividing people along ethnic lines? I think politics and not tribes is the culprit here. The latter was just a convenient platform to stratify the populace by early politicians for their political survival and dominance.
>I think politics and not tribes is the culprit here.
AFIK there's nothing historically (pre-colonial era) that could shed light on why these two groups can't seem to get along. May be examining a similar setting outside Kenya could provide some much needed clarity.
But coming back to our situation, politics could be to blame. As soon as independence was attained there was a scramble for power and resources that has left many with a bitter taste in their mouths. The communities that 'lost' out, so to speak,feel like they need to eliminate the apparent victors in order to thrive.
This to me speaks to a deeper issue that is the mindset of scarcity. In the minds of many there is a finiteness in the magnitude of resources available and as such they need to be acquired by all means necessary and as quickly as possible. Obviously this isn't the reality but it is perceived as such.
One way neighboring Tanzania solved this issue is through standardization; it came at a cost though. TZ adopted some fiscally irresponsible nation building plans because they adopted communism and this affected their economy adversly to the point that their then president Mwalimu Julius Nyerere(who had initially introduced it) admitted to its failure and opened up the economy by allowing people to own businesses. However, hidden somewhere within these nation building plans was also a certain sense of nationhood and brotherhood. They all spoke the same language(swahili) for instance as opposed to their tribes' languages. Even today, it is the same case and you'll never ever hear of negative ethnicity there. Their economic plan had a calamitous outcome but their social cohesion is incomparable to that in Kenya.
I hope so too. It's unlikely but you can never be certain.
Hopefully these sorts of studies, and some well constructed timelines clarify things and lay some of the self-delusion to rest.
Of course, there is no written history, but it is an interesting contrast that Afrikaans-which recorded history unequivocally shows spreading in lockstep with violent dispossession-hasn't got any click consonants, despite developing in an area where click languages predominated (SW Cape), and despite having a fair amount of Khoisan stock in a big chunk of its native speaking population (Cape Coloureds).
I don't but most peoples, like most animals are territorial and resist the movement of others into their territory.
Your language theory is interesting. But then the english language as spoken in many areas where it would be the language of the non-peaceful invader inherits from the local language. And getting on for half the words in the english language itself were adopted from the French language of the Normans invaders.
Then learned that Afrikaans is based on Dutch. It's really funny that you can read the main language of a country so far away, since Dutch isn't that spoken by that many people ( 28 million)
Until 1994, it was one of two official languages (along with English). I've also never seen it referred to by the name "African". One of the main causes of the 16 June 1976 Soweto riots was an attempt by the apartheid government to change the medium of instruction in black schools from English to Afrikaans. Although it has never been the first language of the vast majority of black Africans, it is the first language of a large percentage of whites, and mixed-race people (the Coloureds), and especially in rural areas, was a popular second language, however it seems to have been displaced as a second language by English, and most Afrikaans universities and many Afrikaans-medium schools now also offer instruction in English.
That said, I learned it at school, and it was fairly straightforward to pick up as a native English speaker.
@NicoJuicy might have meant to say "common tongue." I can only communicate effectively English and the pervasiveness of Afrikaans still gives me problems - even though it is currently being displaced as the common tongue.
_Interestingly_, however, Paul Le Roux [0] resented having to learn Afrikaans, seeing it as a dated, dead language.
Yes but it's 3rd after Zulu and Xhosa.
And I find it amusing that you say that SA is a predominantly anglophone country, when more people speak Afrikaans in South Africa than English. [0]
+-----------+-------------+-------------+------------+
| Language | L1 speakers | L2 speakers | Total |
+-----------+-------------+-------------+------------+
| Afrikaans | 7,218,390 | 10,300,000 | 17,518,390 |
+-----------+-------------+-------------+------------+
| English | 4,890,000 | 11,000,000 | 15,890,000 |
+-----------+-------------+-------------+------------+