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Entry 26 of 240Reform

The Bantu Expansion

c. 1000 BCE/Africa/Bantu-speaking peoples
Today From Cameroon across central and southern AfricaSpan Bantu expansion · c. 3000 BCE – 500 CE

Over roughly three thousand years, farming peoples speaking related languages moved out of what is now Cameroon and Nigeria and spread across most of Africa south of the Sahara, carrying yams, cattle, and iron. They did not march; they drifted, generation by generation, clearing forest and settling. The evidence is written in language: some five hundred Bantu tongues, from Swahili to Zulu to Shona, are related closely enough that linguists can reconstruct the parent they descend from. It is one of the largest movements of people in human history and it left no conquest to remember.

◆ Worth knowingRoughly one in three Africans today speaks a Bantu language, and the family is so tightly related that a speaker of one can often catch the shape of another — the linguistic fingerprint of a migration that finished before Rome fell.
◆ The mechanismMigration pressure

Large movements of peoples — pushed or pulled — reshape the societies they leave and the ones they enter.

Also: Labor displacement · Demographic shock & recovery

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