Starting in about 1200 b. c., the Bantu peoples began migrating from the region of modern-day Nigeria, spreading westward and southward. The Bantu constituted a loose collection of tribes and nations united by language. In each of the Bantu tongues, of which there were eventually sixteen, the word for "people" is the same: bantu.
Though Westerners are accustomed to speaking of "Africa" as though it were one country, in fact modern Africa consists of more than
The Great Enclosure in the modern nation of Zimbabwe; these ruins were originally the royal palace. Reproduced by permission of the Corbis Corporation.
Fifty official nations—and hundreds upon hundreds of national groups with their own language and way of life. In such an ethnically splintered environment, the average African language has only a half-million speakers. By contrast, Swahili (swah-HEEL-ee), the most well known of the Bantu languages, is today spoken by 49 million people in Kenya, Tanzania, the Congo, and Uganda.
Swahili is the lingua franca of southern Africa, a common language much as Arabic became in the Middle East and as Latin was among educated
Europeans of the Middle Ages. No doubt Swahili's broad base has its roots in medieval times, specifically in a group of east African city-states with trade contacts as far away as China.
World History
