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Bantu

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Bantu

Term applied to over 60 million African people who speak Bantu languages. Comprising many hundreds of groups in eastern, central, and southern Africa, they have little in common apart from their related languages, being socially, culturally, and politically very heterogeneous. Almost all of the peoples practise ancestor worship, but in conjunction with other cults. They are usually divided into the southern Bantu (Zulu, Swazi, Xhosa, Tswana, Basuto, Venda, Ndebele or Matabele, Pondo, Pedi), the central Bantu (Shono, Bemba, Lozi); the western Bantu of the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire) and Angola; and the northeastern Bantu of East Africa (Kikuyu, Kamba, Chagga, Ganda).

It is possible that they originate from the equatorial rain forests of the Cameroon-Nigeria border; alternatively it has been suggested that they spread from the area that is now the southeastern Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire).



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? Mentioned in ? References in periodicals archive
 
Eduoard Labreque, to write Ifikolwe Fyandi na Bantu Bandi (My Ancestors and My People) (1951), which became a seminal written record of Lunda history and philosophy.
Asserting/inventing traditions on the Luapula: the Lunda Mutomboko ... by Cancel, Robert / African Arts
Unlike China, Muslims along the East African coast did not encounter an ancient civilization with an established literary tradition but tribes and peoples wedded to the beauty of their native Bantu tongue, which East African Muslims adopted as their own and worked into a powerful cultural vehicle for Islam, creating the Swahili language (al-sawahilliyya: the language of the coastal areas).
Islam and the Cultural Imperative by Abd-Allah, Umar Faruq / Cross Currents
Awash in the primary colors of the region's Bantu societies: red, white, and black--triad of the spirit world (e.
"He who dines with the leopard is liable to be eaten" by Potter, Polyxeni / Emerging Infectious Diseases
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