The Bantu expansion
Farmers spread from West Africa across half a continent, taking their languages with them.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 500 years
- Known to
- ± 200 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
From around 1000 BCE, Bantu-speaking agricultural communities move out of the Cameroon-Nigeria borderland south and east across the continent, reaching southern Africa over the following two millennia. They carry farming, and later ironworking, into regions occupied by foragers. The result is the Bantu language family — over 500 languages spoken by a third of Africans — and it is one of the largest population movements of the Holocene.