Jan Vansina

New Linguistic Evidence and ‘The Bantu Expansion’

New linguistic evidence about the classification of the Bantu languages does not support the current view that these languages spread as the result of a massive migration or ‘expansion’ by its speakers. Rather the present geographic distribution of Bantu languages is the outcome of many complex historical dynamics involving successive dispersals of individual languages over a time span of millennia and involving reversals as well as successes. This is as true for eastern and southern Africa, where a close correlation between the archaeological evidence documenting the diffusion of basic food-related technologies, including metallurgy and the spreading of Bantu languages has become an axiom, as it is elsewhere. The linguistic evidence concerning the dispersal of Bantu languages in these regions of Africa is completely incongruent with the archaeological record. The existing Bantu expansion hypothesis must be totally abandoned. The scrapping of the hypothesis will make room for more realistic and quite different interpretations and research hypotheses. For example, it follows that the local or regional contribution of speakers of other languages, autochthons and others, to the development of later cultures and societies was probably considerably greater than has hitherto been acknowledged and that the continuities in historical dynamics of all sorts between the Bantu-speaking parts of Africa and areas further north and west are greater than has been hitherto realized.

Western Bantu Expansion

Linguistic studies are now advanced enough to allow us to sketch how Central Africa was settled by farmers who spoke western Bantu languages. From the second millenium B.C. onward, yarn-growers with neolithic tools spread in the rain-forests of the Cameroons. By adapting repeatedly to different environments they expanded over the whole forest area and also over the savannas and woodlands further south. These people were in search of optimal environments, quite willing to move to settle in favoured locales. Although they multiplied there, their expansion over such huge areas meant that their settlements remained very thinly scattered over Central Africa. A thickening of settlement would only occur when new crops – the banana in the rain-forest, cereals in more open lands – allowed farmers to settle in most places. Iron-smelting was less important here than these new crops. These induced further population growth, densities rose and movements in search of the best unknown lands ceased. If the first settlement had only moderately inconvenienced the autochthones, the thickening of population led in time to their absorption, dependence on villagers, or emigration in search of ever-decreasing empty areas.

Religious Movements in Central Africa: A Theoretical Study

A shared sense of discovery and frustration prompts us to write this article. Independently, from our anthropological, historical and sociological research in Zaire over a period of many years, we have been impressed with the pivotal role of religion and magic in that society. The recurrence and development of religious movements in Zaire throughout its known history is an archetypical expression of that predominance. In our view, these movements are an integral dimension of the cultures common to most parts of Zaire and to contiguous areas in Central Africa. A systemic feature of these cultures is that they are conducive to the emergence and evolution of movements with distinctive symbols, rites, beliefs and values. In turn, these movements constantly enrich the underlying cultures from which they emanate.

Long-Distance Trade-Routes in Central Africa

The structure of indigenous trade in Central Africa makes it necessary to distinguish between three different types of trade. There is first the local trade from village to village within a given population. The goods exchanged are generally specialized products from local industry, and the exchange comes about because some villages possess supplies of raw materials which are not available to others, e.g. pottery clay, or because they are inhabited by specialists such as smiths or woodcarvers who are not available in others. This type of trade is conducted in local markets, and generally speaking, currency of some sort is in use. It is still alive today, and one can assume that it is very old, since such a system shows little dynamism. The necessities remain the same; the organization is simple and efficient.

Historians, Are Archeologists Your Siblings?

The historian of pre-nineteenth century Africa…cannot get far without the aid of archaeology. Nevertheless, historians have good reason to be cautious about historical generalisations by archaeologists and about their own use of archaeological material…: it would be a rash historian who totally accepted the conclusions of Garlake and Huffman with the same simple-minded trust as I myself accepted the conclusions of Summers and Robinson. In the beginning, historians of Africa put great store by archeology. Was its great time depth not one of the distinctive features of the history of Africa, a condition that cannot be put aside without seriously distorting the flavor of all its history? Did not the relative scarcity and the foreign authorship of most precolonial written records render archeological sources all the more precious? Did not history and archeology both deal with the reconstruction of human societies in the past? Was the difference between them not merely the result of a division of labor based on sources, so that historical reconstruction follows in time and flows from archeological reconstruction? Such considerations explain why the Journal of African History has regularly published regional archeological surveys in order to keep historians up to date.

Sources of the Nineteenth Century Atlantic Slave Trade

A large proportion of the slaves captured at sea by the British Royal Navy during the early nineteenth century were landed at Sierra Leone. Statistical data on the make-up of the Sierra Leonean population at this period is available from several sources, and it provides some interesting clues to the scope and size of the slave trade from different parts of Africa.

The Bells of Kings

Much speculation has been devoted to the possible connexions between the different clusters of kingdoms in Africa. Scholars have been puzzled for over half a century by the similarities in organization and ideology between different African states. They have tried to explain them either as the product of the diffusion of a common pattern, the ‘Sudanic State’ or the ‘Sacral Kingship’, or by maintaining that similar functional needs led to parallel independent inventions in many different areas. In Central Africa the specific positions taken have been that the Katanga states diffused their model of government to the Lower Congo cluster, or, as I myself have claimed, that these were independent. Dittmer links the Lower Congo with Katanga, and derives the latter cluster itself from the interlacustrine and Ethiopian clusters

Bananas in Cameroun c. 500 BCE? Not proven

The title of a recent paper “First archaeological evidence of banana cultivation in central Africa during the third millennium before present” says its sensational all.’ In it a number of scholars joined forces to claim that bananas were cultivated in Cameroun ca. 500 BCE (ca. 2500 B.P.). The evidence uncovered consisted of phytoliths found at the bottom of a pit (F9) dated by three samples and in a vessel buried in another undated pit (F7NF) at Nkang, a site whose occupation spans the period ca. 2580-2170 bp. The bottom sample from pit F9 dates to 840-370 calibrated BCE and overlaps with the two samples. The dating of F7NF is obtained from dates in adjacent and contemporary features F7b and F6, dated to 800-150 and 850-410 calibrated BCE. The phytoliths were identified as genus Muss (banana) and not genus Ensete on the basis of a comparison with specimens extracted from plant material for the Belgian Royal Botanical Garden and of the in v i m collection of banana plants at TheTropical Crop Improvement laboratory of the University of Leuven cited in their Table 1. The discussion points out that as bananas are seedless, they can only be propagated through cultivation and claims that an early date for that cultivation was to be expected, for “the number of cultivars and their socio-economic importance suggest that they have been cultivated for millennia” which had earlier already led to speculation by a researcher of the Leuven laboratory, that Musd would have arrived from Southeast Asia in East Africa prior to 1000 BCE, a speculation now apparently confirmed by this find. Certainly if this interpretation of the phytoliths as edible bananas and their dating at this single site is correct the consequences would be weighty for the history of the subcontinent. For if these banana, presumably AAB which originated in India, were in Cameroun between 840 and 370 BCE they must not only have been cultivated on the East or Northeast coasts of Africa at least several centuries earlier but also right across Africa between these coasts and the Camerouns. Thus the claimed identification entails the consequences that some agriculture was practiced around ca. 1000 BCE or shortly thereafter by the populations of the northern parts of East and Central Africa. This in turn requires at least partial sedentarization over that whole area, something which is still far from evident in the archaeological record. These are momentous consequences which one must accept if this one slender bit of evidence were incontrovertible. But is it? O n the basis of the evidence as given, it is likely that the association of the dating with the phytoliths is indeed genuine.2 The main problem lies in the identification of the phytoliths as banana rather than Emete. First one should remember that phytolith analysis is a rather recent technique and hence one is somewhat surprised by the fact that no direct

In pursuit of history : fieldwork in Africa

A collection of ten papers on the realities of fieldwork in Africa, mostly by young scholars who have conducted research within the last decade.

Deep-Down Time: Political Tradition in Central Africa

Around 1850 the peoples of central Africa from Duala to the Kunene River and from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes shared a common view of the universe and a common political ideology. This included assumptions about roles, statuses, symbols, values, and indeed the very notion of legitimate authority. Among the plethora of symbols connected with these views were the leopard or the lion, the sun, the anvil, and the drum, symbolizing respectively the leader as predator, protector, forger of society, and the voice of all. Obviously, in each case the common political ideology was expressed in slightly different views, reflecting the impact of differential historical processes on different peoples. But the common core persisted. The gigantic extent of this phenomenon, encompassing an area equal to two-thirds of the continental United States, baffles the mind. How did it come about? Such a common tradition certainly did not arise independently in each of the hundreds of political communities that existed then. However absorbent and stable this mental political constellation was, it must have taken shape over a profound time depth. How and as a result of what did this happen? Is it even possible to answer such queries in a part of the world that did not generate written records until a few centuries ago or less? This paper addresses this question: how can one trace the social construction of such a common constellation over great time depths and over great regional scale? All the peoples involved are agriculturalists and the political repertory with which we are concerned could not easily exist in its known form outside sedentary societies.