Congo Basin Bantu

Date: 3000 b.c.e.-700 c.e.

Locale: Area covered by the Congo River, including Cameroon, Central African Republic, Gabon, Congo (Zaire), and Zimbabwe

Congo Basin Bantu

The Congo Basin covers a large area of modern Cameroon in West Africa, south to Central Africa, and to Congo proper (Zaire) and part of Zimbabwe. The word bantu refers to people as well as to a family of about six hundred languages spoken by millions of Africans in the subcontinent south of the line from the southern Nigeria-Cameroon border in the west to southern Somalia in the east. All the Bantu (BAHN-tew) languages stem from a single ancestral language otherwise labeled as proto-Bantu. It is widely accepted that the cradle of the Bantu language and people is the Nigeria-Cameroon area. From there, the Bantu migrated to the Congo Basin and spread south and east along the Congo River tributaries, eventually reaching both coasts. Later, some began to migrate toward southern Africa, while others moved back through the forest in the direction from which their ancestors had come.

Linguists trace the geographical spread through the linguistic convergence in Bantu grammar and vocabulary. According to one theory, the ultimate source of the Bantu people was in central Benue Valley in eastern Nigeria. Migration then took Bantu speakers southward and eastward into the Congo Basin and ultimately across the continent. Another theory is that their origins were in the north, perhaps central Cameroon or the Central African Republic. From there a major center was established in the Luba country of northern Shaba, Zaire, in an area of light woodland. Gradually, areas of higher rainfall were colonized as the Bantu speakers spread south and east of the equatorial forest.

Bantu differences

From the 1970’s to the 1990’s, linguists established marked linguistic differences of the Bantu using a technique called lexicostatistics, which uses a mass comparison of the most basic vocabulary in the present-day languages. They noticed three distinctive dispersal branches of Bantus: the original, West Bantu, and Mashariki Bantu. The original Bantu language spread from western Cameroon to the northwest of the Great Lakes and southwestward as far as the Ogowe Delta. The ancestral West Bantu language spread from northern Gabon southward as far as northern Namibia and eastward into the inner Zaire Basin, into the west of the Lulu River, and into Angola. The third branch, ancestral Mashariki Bantu, spread to the Great Lakes eastward toward the Indian Ocean and southward into South Africa.

Archaeological evidence for the latter part of the first millennium b.c.e. points to expansion by Iron Age invaders cultivating sorghum and millet at the expense of indigenous Late Stone Age hunter-gatherers. By the fifth century c.e., Bantu speakers had brought the Iron Age as far south as Swaziland and later into northern Namibia. Archaeologists generally agree that the ancestors of such Bantu speakers as the Kalanga, Karanga, and Venda achieved a peak of material cultural development in the tenth century and built the elegant structures, terraces, pits, and fortresses, including the Zimbabwe ruins, that appear across Zimbabwe into Botswana and at Mapungubwe in the Transversal. Other centralized states with impressive size and technological expertise were the kingdom of Congo, Luba, and the Lozi in Central Africa.

Foods, culture, and forces of expansion

Congo Basin Bantu were hunter-gatherers and cultivators; they initially formed small villages, usually organized loosely around clan, descent, or lineage groups. Other groups introduced several varieties of food production and iron technology (such as Chifumbaze Ironworking) to Bantu speakers in subequatorial Africa. They also acquainted Bantu-speaking societies with patrilineal kinship organizations, which were adopted by many Bantu speakers.

The Bantu speakers embarked on a journey away from their Nigeria-Cameroon homeland, traveling south and southeast, and in the course of the first millennium c.e., they fanned out and established themselves as the dominant people of the southern third of the African continent. Their African yams and oil palms grew well in the close, wet climate of the Congo Basin. Other Bantu settled the savannas east and south of the rain forest, where they raised Sudanic crops such as sorghum and bulrush millet.

In the vicinity of the mouth of Zambezi River, the Bantu found food plants of southeast Asia, notably the banana, Asian yam, and cocoyam. One theory suggests that these plants were brought by Indonesian mariners who had blown across the Indian Ocean on the monsoons and established settlements on the East African coast in the third century c.e. The bananas and yams thrived in hot, moist climates where the Sudanic sorghum and millet did not do well. This allowed the Bantu in the area of the great lakes in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda and also in the Congo Basin to create still more productive agricultures.

Political governance

The Bantu speakers lived in relatively stable villages, composed of a few “houses” headed by leaders, whose family members, friends, and servants constituted each house. A group of four or five villages, forming a district, collaborated with each other in economic, matrimonial, medical, religious, and defense matters. Each house also forged cross-alliances with several houses in other villages to constitute clans.

It is important to note that as early as 3000 b.c.e., root-crop agriculture existed at Shum Laka in western Cameroon. In 1500 b.c.e., villages existed in southern Cameroon and in the Gabon Estuary. By 500 b.c.e., Bantus were present on the coast of the Congo and in the western part of the inner Zaire Basin and later in the lower Zaire area. Ironworking appeared in southern Cameroon and Gabon by the fourth century b.c.e., but for several centuries, metalworking, farming, and foraging communities continued to live side by side without apparently borrowing much from each other.

Bibliography

Bobb, F. Scott. Historical Dictionary of Zaire. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1988.

Forbath, Peter. The River Congo: Discovery, Exploration, and Exploitation of the World’s Most Dramatic River. New York: Harper & Row, 1977.

Shaw, Thurstan, et al., eds. The Archaeology of Africa: Food, Metals, and Towns. London: Routledge, 1993.