Bantu expansion
expansion · 3000 BC–700 AD
Over some three thousand years, farmers speaking Bantu languages spread from the borderlands of Nigeria and Cameroon across most of Africa south of the equator, bringing pottery, cereal and root crops and, later, iron working. About a third of Africans speak one of the 500 or so Bantu languages today. The routes are reconstructed from the family tree of the languages and from dated pottery, so the bands show the broad corridors scholars agree on, and the dates are approximate to a century or more.
View Bantu expansion on the map →
At a glance
- Who moved
- Bantu-speaking farmers
- Reached
- Ovamboland, Eastern Cape, Kwale
Recorded boundaries
| Period | Control | Confidence | Evidence | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 3000 BC–2501 BC | — | low confidence | no observation date recorded | Setting out from Grassfields of Cameroon. The homeland the Bantu languages spread from, on the border of today's Nigeria and Cameroon. |
| 2500 BC–1501 BC | — | low confidence | no observation date recorded | Setting out from Grassfields of Cameroon. Reached Sanaga valley (Western stream). |
| 1500 BC–1001 BC | — | low confidence | no observation date recorded | Reached Gabon estuary (Western stream) and Sangha River (Eastern stream). Moving south along the Atlantic edge of the rainforest, where the forest was more open. A drier spell opened a savanna corridor through the rainforest here. |
| 1000 BC–501 BC | — | low confidence | no observation date recorded | Reached Uele and Ituri (Eastern stream). |
| 500 BC–99 AD | — | low confidence | no observation date recorded | Setting out from Great Lakes. Reached Lower Congo (Western stream) and Great Lakes (Eastern stream). Ngovo pottery marks farming villages on the lower Congo by about the 4th century BC. Urewe pottery and early iron smelting west of Lake Victoria. |
| 100 AD–199 AD | — | low confidence | no observation date recorded | Reached Angolan plateau (Western stream). |
| 200 AD–299 AD | — | medium confidence | no observation date recorded | Reached Lake Malawi (Eastern stream) and Kwale (To the Swahili coast). Kwale ware marks the first farming villages on the coast behind Mombasa. |
| 300 AD–349 AD | — | medium confidence | no observation date recorded | Reached Zimbabwe plateau (Eastern stream). |
| 350 AD–449 AD | — | medium confidence | no observation date recorded | Reached Limpopo valley (Eastern stream). Silver Leaves, among the earliest farming villages south of the Limpopo. |
| 450 AD–499 AD | — | medium confidence | no observation date recorded | Reached KwaZulu-Natal coast (Eastern stream). |
| 500 AD–699 AD | — | low confidence | no observation date recorded | Reached Ovamboland (Western stream). The dry savanna to the south slowed the farmers, whose crops needed rain. |
| 700 AD | — | low confidence | no observation date recorded | Reached Eastern Cape (Eastern stream). The southern limit: beyond the Kei, winter rainfall would not grow sorghum and millet. |
Each row is a snapshot the source recorded, not a continuous history. The period between two observations is an inference this atlas shows rather than hides.
Sources
- Rebecca Grollemund, Simon Branford, Koen Bostoen, Andrew Meade, Chris Venditti and Mark Pagel, Bantu expansion shows that habitat alters the route and pace of human dispersals, (2015)
- David W. Phillipson, African Archaeology (3rd edition), (2005)
- Jan Vansina, New linguistic evidence and 'the Bantu expansion', (1995)