The Bantu Migrations

Sometime between 3000 and 1000 BCE — the dating remains debated and varies by region — in the forests and savannas near the border of what is today Nigeria and Cameroon, small communities of farmers began to move. They did not march in armies. There were no emperors commanding them, no single event pushing them forward. They drifted in small groups, a few families at a time, following rivers into denser forest, clearing land, planting crops, building new villages. Then their children did the same. And their children after that.

Over the next two thousand years, this slow, rolling wave of settlement would reshape an entire continent. The descendants of those first migrants would populate most of The vast region of Africa lying south of the Sahara Desert, encompassing diverse ecosystems from tropical rainforest to savanna to desert. Before the Bantu migrations, it was home to hunter-gatherer and pastoralist populations; afterward, it became one of the most linguistically and culturally diverse regions on Earth., carrying a family of closely related languages, a mastery of iron, and agricultural techniques that would transform landscapes from the Congo Basin to the coasts of Mozambique. One of the largest population movements in human history. And for most of modern history, almost nobody outside Africa talked about it.

The word itself is a clue. "Bantu" is not the name of a tribe, an empire, or a nation. It is a linguistic term, coined in 1862 by the German philologist Wilhelm Bleek, who noticed that hundreds of African languages shared a common word for "people": -ntu, with the prefix ba- marking the plural. Bantu simply means "people."