It is a relatively well-known story, or at least one that African history buffs thought they knew. Starting in 3000 BCE and over a period of several millennia, Africa experienced what experts have coined the ‘Bantu Expansion’, a massive migration movement that originated on the borders of modern-day Cameroon and Nigeria and eventually spread to eastern and southern Africa, extending its reach across half the continent.
From the Cameroon Grassfields to the African Great Lakes
The Bantu Expansion is considered to be the greatest migration event in Africa’s prehistory and its consequences are still visible today. Virtually half of all Africans are part of the Bantu-speaking ‘proto-language’ [ancestral language] that is found in countries like Gabon, the Comoros, Sudan and South Africa.
It was 19th century European linguists who put forward the theory that the Bantu languages descended from
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