Why are bantu important?

Answer 1

Because the Bantu Tribe's culture inspired most of Southern Africa's as well...especially with the central spread of the migration where the Bantu people made a huge split in Central Africa going down.

Answer 2

Bantu is a term to describe some 300 to 600 ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages from Central and Eastern to South Africa. The largest individual group are the Zulu with 10 millions of people. There are about 250 languages in all spoken by 60 million people

Answer 3

It is unclear when exactly the spread of Bantu-speakers began from their core area as hypothesized ca. 5,000 years ago. By 3,500 years ago (1500 B.C.) in the west, Bantu-speaking communities had reached the great Central African rain forest, and by 2,500 years ago (500 B.C.) pioneering groups had emerged into thesavannahs to the south, in what are now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola and Zambia. Another stream of migration, moving east, by 3,000 years ago (1000 B.C.) was creating a major new population center near the Great Lakes of East Africa, where a rich environment supported a dense population. Movements by small groups to the southeast from the Great Lakes region were more rapid, with initial settlements widely dispersed near the coast and near rivers, due to comparatively harsh farming conditions in areas farther from water. Pioneering groups had reached modern KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa by A.D. 300 along the coast, and the modern Northern Province (encompassed within the former province of the Transvaal) by A.D. 500.[8]

Early Iron Age findings in eastern and southern Africa

Before the expansion of farming and herding peoples, including those speaking Bantu languages,Africa south of the equator was populated by neolithic hunting and foraging peoples. Some of them were ancestral to modern Central African forest peoples (so-called Pygmies) who now speak Bantu languages. Others were proto-Khoisan-speaking peoples, whose few modern hunter-forager and linguistic descendants today occupy the arid regions around the Kalahari desert. Many moreKhoekhoe and San descendants have a Coloured identity in South Africa and Namibia, speakingAfrikaans and English. The small Hadza and Sandawe populations in Tanzania comprise the other modern hunter-forager remnant in Africa.

Over a period of many centuries, most hunting-foraging peoples were displaced and absorbed by incoming Bantu-speaking communities, as well as by Ubangian, Nilotic and Central Sudanic language-speakers in North Central and Eastern Africa. The Bantu expansion was a long series of physical migrations, a diffusion of language and knowledge out into and in from neighboring populations, and a creation of new societal groups involving inter-marriage among communities and small groups moving to communities and small groups moving to new areas.

After their movements from their original homeland in West Africa, Bantus also encountered in East Africa peoples of Cushitic origin. As