Bantu peoples

The Bantu peoples are the several hundred African ethnic groups, roughly 400 by common counts, who speak Bantu languages. They live across a vast area of Central, East and Southern Africa, from Cameroon to Kenya and South Africa, and number around 350 million people by mid-2010s estimates, roughly 30 per cent of Africa's population. They do not form a single nation: "Bantu" is a linguists' label for a family of related languages and the peoples who speak them, each of whom has their own name and identity.

The name was introduced by the German linguist Wilhelm Bleek in the late 1850s and spread more widely through his 1862 comparative grammar. It is built on a reconstructed root, -ntu, meaning a person, with the plural prefix ba-; versions of the word appear across the family, as abantu in Zulu and Xhosa, watu in Swahili and batho in Sotho and Tswana. Because the term was coined by outsiders, speakers of Bantu languages traditionally identify by their own peoples, such as the Zulu, Shona, Kikuyu or Luba, rather than as "Bantu".

Linguists trace the languages back to Proto-Bantu, thought to have been spoken in the borderlands of today's Cameroon and Nigeria some 3,000 to 4,000 years ago. From there, in what is known as the Bantu expansion, farming communities spread over roughly two millennia across much of sub-equatorial Africa. Linguistic reconstructions describe a western stream moving south through the Congo rainforest or along the Atlantic coast, reaching central Angola around 500 BCE, and an eastern stream reaching the area west of Lake Victoria at about the same time; Bantu speakers had probably reached South Africa by around 300 CE. Early theories linked the spread to farming, pottery and iron, and genetic studies, including a 2023 analysis of nearly 1,500 Bantu speakers, confirm a major migration with extensive mixing with local populations. Along the way the newcomers absorbed or displaced many earlier inhabitants, leaving only some groups, such as Central African forest peoples, the Hadza and the Khoisan of the south, into the era of European contact.

Between the ninth and fifteenth centuries states began to form in the Great Lakes region and on the savannas south of the rainforest, and state-building quickened from the twelfth century as populations grew denser and kingship gained ritual and spiritual authority. Among the best known are Mapungubwe; Great Zimbabwe, a civilisation ancestral to the Shona; the Kingdom of Kongo; the Luba and Lunda states; Buganda, Bunyoro, Rwanda and Burundi; the Mutapa Empire; and, much later, the Zulu Kingdom. On the East African coast, contact with Arab and Persian Muslim traders produced Swahili culture and city-states, and the Swahili language absorbed many Arabic loanwords. Bantu migration, and later the Indian Ocean slave trade, also carried Bantu ancestry and words to Madagascar.

In South Africa the word itself became politically loaded: adopted officially by National Party governments after the Second World War, it came to be identified with apartheid, including the "bantustans", the rural reserves set aside for nominal independence to deny Black South Africans citizenship. By the 1970s the government had dropped it for "Black", and in South Africa today it is used only in its linguistic sense.

Estimates suggest there are between 440 and 680 Bantu languages, depending on how dialects are counted. The Democratic Republic of the Congo by itself is home to about 90 million speakers. Large groups include the Luba of the Congo, the Shona of Zimbabwe, the Zulu, Xhosa and Pedi of South Africa, the Batswana, the Sukuma of Tanzania, the Kikuyu of Kenya and the Baganda of Uganda, each numbering millions. Swahili serves as a lingua franca across much of East Africa.

Our maps use the label "Bantu peoples" for a broad zone of Central, East and Southern Africa on the 800, 900, 1000, 1100, 1200, 1279, 1300, 1400, 1492 and 1500 maps. The outline is approximate, and it sits beside named kingdoms such as Great Zimbabwe and Kongo where those are drawn.