A Brief Background
The
Bantu are an African ethnic group comprised of many different yet highly
related Bantu languages. The Bantu were 
originally
classified linguistically “referring to a widespread group of languages within
the South-Central Niger-Congo family (Pereira et. al., 2001).” Holden (2001)
reports the Bantu as having about 450 related languages. According to Lane et.
al. (2002) the Bantu speakers can be broadly classified into those speaking the
recently derived Eastern Bantu languages and those speaking the more diverse
and older Western Bantu languages. Yet Pereira et. al. (2001) specifies that
Bantu now refers to “a complex physical, anthropological and genetic
characters.” No longer are the Bantu a purely linguistic category but they
have become a cultural and genetic category as well.
Linguistic, archaeologic as well as genetic data have been used to analyze the migratory expansion of the Bantu in the Holocene. According to Pereira et. al. (2001) the Bantu expansion began in two directions: south-western arriving at the equatorial rain forest 3500 years ago, and eastern, entering the fringes of…what is now Uganda, 3000 years ago…” This expansion by the Bantu to different regions within Africa has been closely linked with the spread of agriculture. Bantu languages are thought to have spread and diversified along with the expansion of farming over the past 2000 years (Holden, 2001). The distribution and spread of agriculture have been obtained through archaeological examination of the various ceramic styles and dates in various sites. Holden mapped out the geographical distribution and order of early farming and compared them with the geographic distribution of the modern Bantu. Holden’s studies (2001) found that “the geographical distribution and temporal order of early farming traditions mirror the distribution and branching order of the modern Bantu subgroups.”
Linguistic and archaeological data lend to an interpretation of a massive migration and expansion of the Bantu into sub-Saharan Africa. The geographic spread and order of the Bantu expansion 3500 years ago matches with the geographic distribution of the spread of farming. This had led many to believe that the spread of the Bantu and the spread of agriculture across Africa occurred within the same event, the Holocene expansion.