Bantu in the Crystal Ball, I

Abstract

More than one-third of Africa is occupied by people who speak related languages belonging to a single family called Bantu. This has been recognized for more than a century. As early as 1886 Harry Johnston argued that this situation was the result of differentiation from a real single ancestral language, later called UrBantu or Proto-Bantu. The inevitable question arises: How could one language or a group of closely related dialects diffuse over such a vast area? The fact of Bantu expansion remains a major puzzle in the history of Africa. Many have risen to the bait of solving it. My main goal here is to recount the salient features of this century-long inquiry and in doing so to lead to an assessment of the present situation. Given the nature and the paucity of the available data, much of proposed reconstruction has been conjectural, so that the study of Bantu expansion also has been an exercise in conjectural history and in speculation. The available data are disparate and drawn from different disciplines, and the results tell us something about what can and what cannot be done in interdisciplinary research. In the telling I hope to demonstrate how much different considerations of the question have been moulded by the major themes in European and American intellectual history of the last century and how much scholarly tradition, once established, has directed and limited the solutions proposed.

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