Some people use the term “Bantu people” to describe the roughly 60 million Africans who speak languages in the Bantu language family. Given that there are approximately 400 of these closely related languages, it should come as no surprise that the Bantu people are incredibly diverse. Some people feel that the term may not be entirely appropriate, since it encompasses such a huge group of Africans; these individuals may prefer to identify individual communities within the Bantu people instead.

It is estimated that the Bantu tribes probably began migrating from Northern Africa around 3,000 BCE. They probably brought an assortment of skills with them, including the ability to farm and work metals such as iron, and this migration continued until around the fourth century CE. Many of these speakers settled South of the Congo River. Over time, a number of languages including Swahili, Kirundi, Gikuyu, Tsonga, and Basaa developed; many of these languages share the word “Bantu” for people, and except for a region in South-East Africa where Khoi-San is spoken, they dominate Southern Africa.

Many of the great kingdoms of South Africa were ruled by Bantu people, who tended to be highly resourceful and adaptable. The Bantu culture subsumed other native Africans, although traces of earlier African peoples can be seen in some Bantu societies today. These kingdoms traded with people from other regions of the world, including Europeans, and as Europeans started to colonize Africa, they pressured the existing Bantu populations to move. Bantu-speaking people can be found in Rwanda, Angola, Burundi, Zimbabwe, and South Africa, among other nations in the Southern part of Africa.

Around the 1920s, whites in South Africa started to use the term “Bantu.” Over time, the term began to be perceived as racially offensive, and many modern South Africans prefer to use the term “African,” rather than “Bantu,” because of the connotations with apartheid South Africa. In other regions of Africa, some people use the term more freely, because it has not become as racially loaded as it has in South Africa.

When you hear the term “Bantu people,” you should understand that it refers to a huge group of Africans with very different cultural and religious beliefs. Among the Bantu people, societies and governments can be radically different. The term refers to the African people of shared ethnicity who descended from the Bantu migrants who rapidly spread across South Africa around 5,000 years ago, and to those Africans who speak languages in the Bantu family.