The Bantu Conundrum

Societies across the middle of the continent, from Luanda and Libreville in the west to Dar es Salaam in the east, and from Cameroon to the Drakensberg range and the Cape in the south, share many words and grammatical features that have come to be called the Bantu family of languages. Designation of these languages as "Bantu" is to some extent arbitrary, the result of nineteenth-century European linguistic research, which recognized large regions in Southern and Central Africa whose languages shared cognates. The cognate ntu , meaning "person," (plural, bantu , people) was but one of hundreds that could have been utilized to describe the entire set. In twentieth-century linguistic and archaeological research, the extent of commonality and variation in this common linguistic base has become much clearer.

In the twentieth century the notion "Bantu" has also taken on a range of connotations, positive in one setting, negative in another, and both in other settings, depending on whose perspective is entertained. It has come to stand for a mode of thought, or ethnophilosophy, presumably based on indigenous ideas, an approach to the study of African thought that is roundly criticized by some. It has become a rubric of major historical research, especially in Equatorial Africa, where the Centre International des Civilisations Bantoues of Libreville, Gabon, conducts cross-disciplinary work and publishes the journal Muntu . In Southern Africa, however, the notion "Bantu" has taken on a negative connotation because of the South African government's reification of a stultified tribal and imposed interpretation of African culture, particularly as carried out in education for blacks. The simultaneous positive search for civilizational heritage that one sees in Equatorial Africa under the rubric of "Bantu," and the negative tribal connotation of "Bantu Education" in South Africa, contribute to the Bantu conundrum.

For present purposes it suffices to summarize the central findings of some of this historical research. A body of current scholarship (Bastin 1983; Bastin, Coupez, and de Halleux 1981; Meeussen 1967, 1980; DeMaret 1984; Heine 1984; Phillipson 1985; Vansina 1984; Hyman and Voorhoeve 1980; Ehret and Posnansky 1982; and Van Noten 1981) establishes the origin of Bantu languages in the eastern Nigerian and western Cameroonian area, in the early first, possibly the late second, millennium B.C. Linguistic classifications, based on methods of "least common" and "most common" (or shared) lexical and grammatical features, determine that these languages are genetically related to West African languages.^[1] "Bantu" is thus defined as a narrow language group—though spread across a vast subcontinent—in a wider set of interrelated language families that are sometimes referred to as "Bantoid" (Heine 1984) in the much more extensive "Niger-Congo" group (Greenberg 1955).

The same methodology—that is, genetic classification of least common and most common cognates or features in sets of languages within the family—establishes further that the Bantu languages had, by the first millennium B.C. , begun to spread southward through the forest zones and the Atlantic coast of Equatorial Africa, and eastward along the northern edge of the forest-savanna border into the Interlacustrine region (see fig. 7).

Thereafter, additional "nuclear zones" are posited, from which further dispersion occurred eastward and southward. One of these was the

Figure 7. 
Major lines of Bantu migrations, according to recent scholarship,
and four sites of field research for this book: Kinshasa, representing
Western Bantu; Dar es Salaam, on the Indian Ocean coast, representing
both inland East African and Swahili coastal influences; Swaziland, the
northern Nguni-speaking setting; Cape Town, a cosmopolitan South
African setting.

"Congo nucleus" in the forest regions of Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, and Zaire (Heine, Hoff, Vossen 1977), also spoken of as "Western Bantu" (Vansina 1984, 1990). Another was "East Highland," from the lake regions (Heine, Hoff, Vossen 1977), also called "Eastern Bantu." Later, in the first millennium A.D. , the expansions continued into East Africa and to Southern Africa, and, with a mixture of Eastern and West-

ern, across the Southern Savanna to the southwest, in Zaire, Angola, and Namibia.

This demonstrated expansion of the Bantu languages raises a number of questions about the relationship of language to other facets of culture that are germane to our interest in therapeutics, particularly ngoma. What was the technological basis of these societies that permitted their expansion into territories occupied by the hunting-and-gathering populations preexistent in the continent? Was this Bantu expansion more on the order of a gradual technological and cultural transfer, community by community, or was it more like a migration? Were Bantu languages tied to a more intensive agriculture? If so, at what point did iron working become the basis of this agrarian technology? Further, what types of food crops were used? Given the contrasting environments into which the speakers of Bantu languages moved—from savanna into rain forest and back to savannas—what were the adaptive advantages that gave the Bantu speakers the resilience to replace other ways of life and other languages? Were the speakers of Bantu languages organized in any particular social structures? What were their beliefs? What were their assumptions and values about health and society, and their approaches to healing? Are these reflected consistently in the common cognates across the region? How did they utilize the varied environments and natural products to improve health? Were the ngoma rituals of any particular importance in the process of expansion? Finally, if we assume a common source for ngoma, which features have remained continuous and which have changed? Are these reflected in the common and varying cognates across the region?

It is now argued, on the basis of recent archaeological research in Cameroon and Gabon (Van Noten 1981; Vansina 1984, 1990) that the Western Bantu expansion along the Atlantic coast and into the rain forest was a gradual expansion of stone-tool utilizing cultivators of West African forest-related cultigens, that is, trees such as the oil palm and root crops such as yams. The Eastern Bantu cultigens, which presumably brought the West African grassland crops to the Southern Savanna, and later to Southern Africa, included millet, sorghum, and cowpeas.

The appearance of iron working in this technological-cultural setting is now believed to have occurred about 750 to 500 B.C. , the date of early iron-working finds in Nigeria. Related iron-working sites, or evidence of iron, have been found recently in Gabon and Cameroon. The

expansion of the eastern lake Bantu may have occurred as early as 750 to 500 B.C. with the use of iron smelting and smithing. This accelerated the ability of Bantu speakers to dominate the landscape, to grow crops, to hunt, and in general to improve their adaptive advantage. It is thought also to have contributed later to the ability to form centralized states. The earlier hypotheses that Bantu expansion might have been due to iron and selected introductions of crops from Asia (Murdock 1959) have not been borne out in recent archaeological and linguistic research. For one thing, the archaeological finds of iron are simply too late to support such a hypothesis. Also, the language cognates that pertain to iron working are too disparate to lend credence to a hypothesis of dispersion from a common point.

The role of cattle and other livestock in the Bantu expansion has been studied at some length because of the absence of livestock in the Western forest region (due to tsetse fly infestation) and the extensive use of livestock in East African and Southern African Bantu-speaking societies. Ehret, studying the character of language cognates associated with livestock, demonstrates that this part of an Eastern Bantu complex was introduced from Central Sudanic peoples to the lake region by 500 B.C. (Ehret 1973–74), from where it spread southward.

The Bantu expansion must not be construed to have been a migratory spread of a biological or "racial" group, except in selected dimensions. Genetic markers of the northeast Bantu region north of the lakes resemble markers of populations in the origin area in the Cameroon and eastern Nigerian region (Hiernaux 1968). Otherwise, genetic studies have revealed diverse populations, in many instances reflecting "pre-Bantu," but speaking homogeneous Bantu languages.

Many of the recent specialized linguistic studies in the Bantu zone have had their basis in the massive lifetime work of Malcolm Guthrie, published in the four-volume work Comparative Bantu (1967–71), which maps the distribution of several thousand cognates. Guthrie's compilations are not exhaustive. The lexica are built around key word sets determined by linguists to represent basic cultural domains; they are then expanded into more culturally particular domains. Further, Guthrie's lexical reconstructions are of necessity limited to those Bantu languages for which dictionaries and vocabularies were available in the 1950s and 1960s when he did his work. Guthrie interpreted the evidence, based on degrees of common lexical stock, to argue for a Western and an Eastern Bantu divergence from a central point on the Southern Savanna. Although this hypothesis has been discredited by

subsequent research, his compendium, and subsequent work to build up the basic project,^[2] provides a growing foundation for new studies that test additional hypotheses. It is Guthrie's lexicon, with a few supplemental sources, that permits us to demonstrate the character of a proto-Bantu level of therapeutic-oriented verbal cognates and derivative secondary, Western and Eastern, subsets of cognates, concepts, and practices, and the place of ngoma in this set.