In west Africa, meanwhile, one of the great long-term migrations in human history was underway. It was initiated by a group of Bantu-speaking communities living in an upland region between the Nyong River and the Sanaga River in what is now southern Cameroon. The Bantu group there were part of a wider collection of peoples in west Africa that belonged to the Niger-Congo language family. What prompted the migration is unclear. But the location of its origins was found by language experts in the twentieth century engaged in the classification of African languages. They discovered that almost all the inhabitants of the southern half of Africa spoke languages that were closely related. Across a range of some 600 languages, many words and terms were used in common. They included the root ntu meaning ‘human being’ and the prefix ba denoting the plural form. The term ‘Bantu’ – literally meaning ‘people’ – was first coined by a nineteenth-century German philologist, Wilhelm Bleek, to cover the multiplicity of similar languages that European colonisers encountered in southern Africa. But the original homeland of Bantu-speaking peoples was the Cameroon highlands, more than 2,500 miles away.
The spread of territory occupied by Niger-Congo peoples at the beginning of the fourth millennium BCE ran from the Senegal River in the west to Cameroon in the east. The eastern zone was inhabited by a sub-group known as the Benue-Kwa. Among their descendants are the Yoruba, Igbo and Akan of modern times. Bantu-speakers formed a sub-group of the Benue-Kwa, living on the eastern frontier at the edge of the equatorial rainforest.
The Benue-Kwa were agriculturalists adapted to a tropical environment. Their staple crop was a variety of yam, an edible tuber indigenous to west Africa. They also tended several tree crops including oil palms that provided cooking oil and palm wine; raffia palms used for making raffia cloth; and kola nuts that later became a mainstay of west African commerce. They were skilled boat-builders, carving from single logs dugout canoes for fishing and river-travel. Woodworkers also specialised in producing figure sculptures and facial masks for display at public festivals. Like other Niger-Congo people, the Benue-Kwa possessed distinctive musical talents. Performances involved polyrhythmic drumming on drums with different pitches – rhythms that would eventually become a familiar part of music-making in the modern world. Another feature of their society was the importance they attached to the veneration of ancestral spirits. Ancestors required respect and remembrance; neglecting them was likely to cause misfortune. The Benue-Kwa also believed that misfortune could be caused by the malicious intentions of living individuals for which they sought remedies from traditional healers.
Towards the end of the fourth millennium BCE, Bantu-speaking cultivators began to move southwards through the rainforest region, taking their agricultural skills, stone tools, dugout canoes and pottery techniques into areas hitherto occupied by BaTwa hunter-gatherers, an ancient people commonly known in European languages as ‘Pygmies’. Their advance through the rainforest was slow; it amounted to an overall rate of no more than twelve miles each decade. But by about 1000 BCE, Bantu groups using rivers as pathways had penetrated to most parts of the Congo Basin and reached the outer edge of the equatorial forest to the east and to the south.
Beyond the forest region lay the savanna lands of eastern and southern Africa, the domain of hunter-gatherers, descendants of one of the oldest human lineages on earth. Short in stature, generally less than five feet tall, they possessed a wide range of skills honed over thousands of years of itinerant life in the savanna. They fashioned tools from wood, bone and stone, turned plant fibres into fine cordage and nets, made mats and arrow shafts from reeds, and devised a range of poisons from snakes, insects and plants to bring down prey.
Most remarkable of all was their tradition of rock art dating back as far as 28,000 years. In eastern Africa, the main rock art form was finger-painted geometric patterns, often circles and parallel lines. In southern Africa, below the Zambezi River, artists belonging to groups that later became known as San pursued a different tradition. At thousands of sites across the region, San artists painted scenes in fine-line brushstrokes of human activity, totemic animals and creatures from an imaginary world. The artists were shamans, leading figures in San society, who reflected in the paintings their memories of trances and hallucinations induced during trance dances. Trance dances, they believed, enabled them to enter a spirit world where they could harness supernatural powers to make rain, cure the sick, relieve social tensions and control the movement of antelope herds. Their rock art images depict trance dancers bending forward, wearing dancing rattles and holding dancing sticks in the company of animals such as eland, giraffe and elephant believed to have supernatural potency.
The languages spoken by San were ancient. They involved a complex variety of ‘clicks’ and other percussive sounds that once may have formed the basis of a linguistic family stretching from modern Ethiopia to southern Africa before it was filtered out by the evolution of newer languages.
Since the fourth millennium BCE, the domain of hunter-gatherers in eastern Africa had attracted various groups of African migrants. From the Ethiopian highland region to the north-east came Cushitic-speaking pastoralists bringing livestock and agricultural skills; by the second millennium BCE, they had reached the Serengeti plains in modern Tanzania, their southern limit. From the Nile Valley to the north-west came Nilotic pastoralists cultivating crops like sorghum. But it was the arrival of Bantu migrants from the Congo rainforest region to the west that had the most far-reaching impact. Bantu-speaking communities steadily spread across eastern Africa towards the coast, acquiring cattle and new agricultural techniques along the way. Although hunter-gatherers managed to co-exist with the newcomers, trading with them, they were eventually absorbed by their advance. Today in eastern Africa, only two groups of descendants survive: the Hadzabe and Sandawe of Tanzania.
The advent of ironworking technology produced a new dynamic in tropical Africa. By the middle of the first millennium BCE, ironworking was well established in the region between the Chad Basin and the Great Lakes of east Africa. It had also spread to areas of west Africa. Iron products were made at Taruga on the Jos plateau of modern Nigeria by members of the ‘Nok culture’, renowned for their terracotta sculptures of human heads. In Jenne-Jeno, an urban settlement on the floodplains of the Middle Niger River, specialist ironworkers produced a high-grade metal akin to steel. Iron-tipped spears and arrows were a boon to hunters; iron tools such as axes and hoes enabled early farmers to clear large areas of woodland for cultivation, making agriculture more productive.
In east Africa, the practice of ironworking radiated from groups in the Great Lakes region known as Mashariki. Large areas of woodland were felled to provide charcoal for smelting furnaces. The Mashariki Bantu also produced from their smelting sites a new style of earthenware with distinctive decorative markings called Urewe, which was to spread in various forms across eastern and southern Africa.
The final phase of Bantu expansion into southern Africa in the last part of the first millennium BCE occurred at a faster pace. From the third century BCE onwards, pioneer groups advanced from eastern Africa along several different routes. Equipped with iron tools, they pushed the agricultural frontier southwards, bringing with them cattle and sheep, preferring river valleys and well-watered terrain in which to settle and relying on sorghum and millet as staple foods, as well as fishing, foraging and hunting. By the second century BCE, some groups had reached the Middle Zambezi region. Other groups moved down the Indian Ocean coast, exploiting shellfish and other marine resources along the way, arriving in the Limpopo Valley by the second century CE and pressing on to the lush green hills and valleys of modern Natal a century later. Their advance eventually came to a halt at the Great Kei River, beyond which lay the Cape region where tropical crops such as sorghum could no longer be grown.
Once agricultural communities had taken root, they began to develop distinct regional identities and cultures. But they nevertheless retained in common many of the social and religious ideas and practices originating from their Niger-Congo forebears that had been passed down the generations over several thousand years of migration. Bantu-speaking peoples still venerated the spirits of their ancestors and believed that misfortune could be attributed to the evil designs of malicious individuals. They also possessed the same talents for drumming and dancing.
Cereal agriculture formed the economic base of these communities, but cattle acquired increasing economic and social significance. Cattle became the chief form of wealth, conferring on owners status and prestige far above that of cultivators. They were a means of creating patronage and obligation. Many groups rose to power through their ownership and control of cattle herds.
The impact of Bantu-speaking immigrants on the San hunter-gatherers of southern Africa was profound. Several groups, such as the Khoikhoi of the Middle Zambezi region, adapted to a new way of life as pastoralists, mixing cattle and sheep herding with hunting and gathering. In their search for grazing land, the Khoikhoi began their own expansion southwards, taking their livestock into the steppes of the Kalahari and eventually finding their way to the southern Cape. Some San groups were absorbed into Bantu communities. Other San groups managed to survive as nomadic foragers but were often driven into arid terrain or mountainous regions of little use to farmers.
Along the Orange River region and in other parts of the Cape, shamans from the Taa-Kwi branch of the San held fast to their ancient traditions of rock painting for another thousand years. It was a period memorable as the last great flowering of the oldest art form in human history.