How Did The Migration Through The Rain Forest Change The Way The Bantu Farmed And Raised Animals?

The migration of the Bantu people from their origins in southern W Africa saw a gradual population movement sweep through the cardinal, eastern, and southern parts of the continent starting in the mid-2d millennium BCE and finally ending before 1500 CE. With them, the Bantu brought new technologies and skills such every bit cultivating high-yield crops and iron-working which produced more efficient tools and weapons. Eventually, the Bantu dominated, with the exception of Due south Africa and the Namibian desert, all of the African continent south of a line crossing from southern Nigeria to Republic of kenya. In all, some 500 languages spoken today in that vast expanse are derived from the Proto-Bantu language. Although most historians would agree on the general occurrence of the Bantu migrations across Africa, the precise timings, motivations, routes, and consequences are all still being debated.

The Bantu

The Bantu were agriculturalists who spoke various dialects of the Bantu language. Their heartland was the savannah and rain forest regions around the Niger River of southern West Africa (modern Nigeria, Cameroon, and Gabon). Using both stone and iron tools, they successfully grew crops such as millet, sorghum, dry rice, beans, oil palms, and melons, although they did then at a subsistence level, that is they grew only sufficient crops to meet their ain needs. They had the engineering to create iron from iron ore, but where this came from is not known except that the three most likely possibles are: the knowledge was introduced by the Phoenicians in the north, the Egyptians or Kushites in the e, or it was acquired locally and independently.

The Bantu'due south iron tools improved agricultural yields & their fe weapons made them formidable military opponents.

The Bantu people's atomic number 26 tools improved agricultural yields and their iron weapons made them formidable military opponents. They were likewise hunters, animal herders (goats, sheep, and cattle), potters, weavers and traders, exchanging such goods every bit common salt, copper, and iron ore for those things they needed.

Migration East & South

During the 2nd millennium BCE, modest population groups of Bantu began to drift into Central Africa and then across to the Great Lakes region of East Africa. This movement tin be traced past the study of linguistics - a technique known every bit lexicostatistics - and ascertainment of the relative closeness of local languages to each other and the language originally spoken past the Bantu people of the Niger River delta: Proto-Bantu. At the aforementioned time, ane should be cautious with such studies as the passage of a language may not necessarily reflect the migration of its speakers. The same might exist said of cultural practices and technologies.

Historians suggest the reason for the Bantu migration may be any 1 or more of the following :

• exhaustion of local resources - agricultural land, grazing lands, and forests
• overpopulation
• dearth
• epidemics
• increased competition for local resources
• warfare betwixt rival tribes or equally a consequence of succession disputes
• climate change affecting crops
• a spirit of adventure

It was the Bantu people who founded the littoral settlements of East Africa, what would become, with the addition of Muslim traders from Arabia and Persia from the seventh century CE, the Swahili Coast. From southern West Africa (the Westward Bantu) and the Great Rift Valley of East Africa (the East Bantu) 2 streams of Bantu peoples and so moved further south in a 2d wave of migration which occurred during the 1st millennium BCE. A third wave of migration, in the first one-half of the 1st millennium CE, and then took place as the Eastward Bantu peoples moved even farther south into what is today Zimbabwe, Botswana, Mozambique, and eastern Due south Africa.

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The Corking Enclosure, Keen Zimbabwe

Janice Bong (CC By-SA)

The process of the Bantu migration has traditionally been seen by scholars as a gradual one of filtering downwards from village to village (and sometimes dorsum over again) through a rather sparsely populated Africa. Notwithstanding, the UNESCO General History of Africa puts a rather dissimilar slant on the process, at least in regards to the showtime wave:

The primary expansion of the Bantu was vast and fast, not a series of gradual stages as some have argued. But it was a matter neither of purposeless nomadic wandering, nor of organized military conquest. It was a remarkable process of colonization - in the true sense of the word - the opening upward of substantially empty lands. (Mokhtar, 320)

The Bantu shared their cognition of iron-smelting, pottery-making, and their farming skills with indigenous forager and nomadic tribes they met, many of whom eventually so settled into stable village communities. Bantu dialects and aspects of Bantu culture were adopted, although the migrants, it is important to note, besides learnt from the ethnic peoples, especially in areas like the tillage of some grain crops or fishing techniques which had been perfected over centuries to get the best from the specific local environmental weather condition. In improver, many cultural practices - the use of stone and obsidian tools, to requite but one instance - often continued to be used in parallel with the Bantu people'due south superior technologies.

The principal consequences of the Bantu migration, then, may be summarised as:

• the spread of the Bantu and Bantu-related languages.
• the spread of iron-smelting and smithing technology.
• the spread of pottery techniques.
• the spread of agronomical tools and techniques.
• deforestation as charcoal was needed to smelt fe and metal tools fabricated forest clearing easier.
• the spread of sure foods into new areas such as plantain bananas and yams.
• an increase in people living in villages which in plow created more distinct regional societies, kingships formed and in that location were further developments in technology.
• the retreat of some indigenous peoples to more remote areas.

As the peoples the Bantu came across were yet in the Stone Age in terms of weapons and engineering science, the fe-weaponed migrants with their specialised warrior caste had piddling problem imposing themselves wherever they went. Their superior technology besides encouraged local peoples to accept Bantu leadership. Some groups did resist this moving ridge of Bantu culture, such equally the 'pygmies' who retreated to the depths of the central Africa rainforests or the groups of savannah hunter-gatherers, the San, who likewise retreated to the inhospitable and less accessible environment of the Kalahari Desert.

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This commodity has been reviewed for accuracy, reliability and adherence to academic standards prior to publication.

Source: https://www.worldhistory.org/Bantu_Migration/

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