BANTU PEOPLES

the approximately 60,000,000 speakers of the more than 200 distinct languages of the Bantu subgroup of the Niger-Congo family (see Bantu languages), occupying almost the entire southern projection of the African continent. The classification is primarily linguistic, for the cultural patterns of Bantu speakers are extremely diverse; the linguistic connection, however, has given rise to considerable speculation concerning a possible common area of origin of the Bantu peoples, the linguistic evidence pointing strongly to the region of the present-day CameroonNigeria border. It is generally agreed that some one-third of the continent today occupied by Bantu-speaking peoples was, until approximately 2,000 years ago, the dominion of other groups, mainly Pygmies and San (Bushmen), and the causes and itinerary of the subsequent Bantu migration have attracted the attention of several anthropologists. George P. Murdock of the United States postulated that the expansion of the Bantu was associated with their acquisition of certain Malaysian food crops (banana, taro, and yam), which spread westward across the continent at about the time that the migration is thought to have begun. These crops, Murdock argued, enabled them to penetrate the tropical rain forest of equatorial Africa, whence they spread across the southern part of the continent. A more widely held view, however, is that the migratory route lay eastward, across the southern Sudan, and then south, past the great lakes of the northeast. The economic, social, and political organization of the various Bantu-speaking peoples is extremely diverse, partly reflecting the wide range of habitats they occupy. The economy may, for example, be based on pastoralism, on sedentary agriculture, on a combination of agriculture, hunting, and gathering (particularly in the equatorial forest), or on fishing and river trade, as among some groups of the central equatorial region. Descent and kinship systems, religious practices, and political organization exhibit a similar range of diversity.