Bantu Migrations in the Medieval Period
Explore how the Bantu migrations continued to reshape sub-Saharan Africa in the medieval period, spreading agriculture, iron-working, and languages.
The Bantu migrations — one of the largest and longest population movements in human history — continued to reshape sub-Saharan Africa throughout the medieval period. While the migrations began thousands of years earlier in West-Central Africa, their later phases (c. 500–1500 CE) established the linguistic and cultural landscape of eastern and southern Africa that persists today.
Bantu-speaking peoples carried with them a package of technologies and practices — iron-working, agriculture, cattle-herding, and pottery traditions — that transformed the regions they settled. As they moved into eastern and southern Africa, they displaced, absorbed, or traded with existing Khoisan hunter-gatherer populations. The result was a gradual but sweeping transformation of the continent's human geography.
The medieval phase of Bantu expansion was closely connected to the rise of major African states. Great Zimbabwe, the Swahili coast city-states, and the kingdoms of the Great Lakes region all developed within Bantu-speaking populations. The spread of Bantu languages — today spoken by roughly 350 million people across a vast swath of the continent — is one of the most significant demographic events in African history, yet it remains far less well-known than comparable migrations in Eurasia.