The Bantu Expansion is unique among ancient dispersals of peoples and languages due to its combination of high amplitude, rapid pace, and adaptation to multiple ecozones ().The spread of Bantu-speaking people from a homeland region on the border between Nigeria and Cameroon toward eastern and southern Africa starting ~4000 years ago had a momentous impact on the continent's linguistic . From Australia, we move to Africa, and a slightly different take on genocide. Personal communication from Mr Fagg.Google Scholar, 14 Unless otherwise stated, all carbon dates are taken from the summaries published in the Journal of African History, II (1961), 1379, and IV (1963), 5278.Google Scholar, 15 Guthrie, Malcolm, loc. The land rights, of course, were freely utilized, while the protection often simply meant bondage. Summary. Some 6.5 million of those were Muslims migrating from India to Pakistan, and 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan to India. Because he's literate And using reason to research DNA and other recorded information. Was the Bantu Expansion genocide of the Pygmies, Khoisan, and - reddit Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more. The land rights, of course, were freely utilized, while the protection often simply meant bondage. [28] Where Bantu was adopted via language shift of existing populations, prior African languages were spoken, probably from African language families that are now lost, except as substrate influences of local Bantu languages (such as click sounds in local Bantu languages). Archaeological evidence from the separate works of Jean Hurault (1979, 1986 & 1988) and Rigobert Tuech (2000) in the region reveals that this region has been inhabited by the same culture for 5 millennia, from 3000 B.C to date. During their initial migration across most of Central, Eastern, and Southern Africa, which took place between . There seems to be much more evidence for the Bantu Expansion than the Aryan 'Invasion' (quote marks because some suggest migration, some say invasion). India was, as the saying goes, the Jewel in the British Crown. However, beneath the sea lies evidence of a lost world a mass of land that []. Unfortunately, it is also greatly understudied and often unknown to history enthusiasts. Congo, Gabon) between 2500 BC and 1200 BC.[18]. Professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law, Francis A. Boyle, argues that these actions, according to sections (a), (b), and (c) of Article 2 of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, constitute genocide. View your signed in personal account and access account management features. The result was death and mayhem on truly epic proportions. Keywords: Bantu migration, Great Lakes Africa, Bantu . Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways: Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. The Russians, of course, be it in WWI or WWII, always did big numbers, but this certainly was a big one. These innovations facilitated population growth and the division of labour, forming powerful Bantu-controlled African states in the process. Some argue that the famine came about as an unintended consequence of the Soviet Unions rapid, perhaps too rapid industrialization, while others claim that it was a deliberate attack against Ukrainian nationalism, and as such, a textbook case of genocide. The indigenous population of the territory comprised dispersed agricultural and pastoral communities belonging to the two major indigenous population groups in southern Africa. Your email address will not be published. Early critics argued this phenomenon was a result of language spread rather than the migration of Bantu-speaking people, but genetic evidence has proved otherwise. See below. For more than a century, historians have supported the idea of a 'Bantu Expansion' that, starting in West Africa several millennia ago, spread across the southern half of the continent. The German government has in recent years heard demands for compensation and recognition of the victims, and the legacy of this event remains a strain on relations between the two nations. Control of East Africa was essential to the Allies as [], By Madison Moulton Looking out at the North Sea the body of water dividing Britain and the rest of Europe you would never suspect this hub of marine activity was once not a marine environment at all. This was to ensure that all food produced in Ireland remained in Ireland, guaranteeing that everyone had enough to eat, even during the leanest times. Researchers have found ways to trace the movement of Bantu-speaking peoples that began possibly as early as 2000 BCE. [22], Nilo-Saharan-speaking herder populations comprised a third group of the area's pre-Bantu expansion inhabitants.[23][24][25]. https://investigativegenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2041-2223-1-6https://investigativegenetics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/2041-2223-1-6/tables/3. The Hutu are almost similar to the Tutsi who are also an ethnic majority in Rwanda. In Eastern and Southern Africa, Bantu speakers may have adopted livestock husbandry from other unrelated Cushitic-and Nilotic-speaking peoples they encountered. Such groups as Slavs, blacks, Roma, various Soviets, prisoners of war of different shades, homosexuals, Jehovahs Witnesses and political opponents were all treated much the same. The latter, the Khoisan, are the original, and much more ancient race displaced by the Bantu, and relegated in many instances to the arid desert reaches of the west of the sub-continent. The Bantu first originated around the Benue-Cross rivers area in southeastern Nigeria and spread over Africa to the Zambia area. Michael C. Campbell and Sarah A. Tishkoff, "The Evolution of Human Genetic and Phenotypic Variation in Africa,", "Genetic and Demographic Implications of the Bantu Expansion: Insights from Human Paternal Lineages", "The Genetic Structure and History of Africans and African Americans", "On the edge of Bantu expansions: MtDNA, Y chromosome and lactase persistence genetic variation in southwestern Angola", "Y-chromosomal variation in sub-Saharan Africa: Insights into the history of NigerCongo groups", "Phylogeographic analysis of the Bantu language expansion supports a rainforest route", "Early migrations into East Africa | Enzi", "Inferring the Demographic History of African Farmers and Pygmy HunterGatherers Using a Multilocus Resequencing Data Set", "Cultural phylogeography of the Bantu Languages of sub-Saharan Africa", "Bringing together linguistic and genetic evidence to test the Bantu expansion", "Bantu expansion shows that habitat alters the route and pace of human dispersals", "Bantu Language Trees Reflect the Spread of Farming across Sub-Saharan Africa: A Maximum-Parsimony Analysis", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bantu_expansion&oldid=1142078895, Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from November 2022, Wikipedia articles needing page number citations from September 2015, Short description is different from Wikidata, Articles with unsourced statements from February 2022, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 28 February 2023, at 11:21. This paper outlines four stages of the Bantu expansion: first, the initial push through the equatorial forest from the northern to the southern woodlands; second, the occupation of the southern woodland belt from coast to coast; third, the colonization of the Tanzania, Kenya and southern Somali coastline and of the northern sector of the lake region; fourth, the colonization south-wards, north-westwards and north-eastwards from this extended nucleus. The result was the decimation of the interior population of South Africa, and the ruination of the social and productive landscape. Between 1.5 and 3 million Cambodians died, or were killed by the regime. The German Empire claimed the colony in 1884, as part of what was known as the Scramble for Africa. These were, and are the Bantu and the Koi-koi, or Khoisan. Was the Bantu expansion or migration a genocide? - Quora Initially, archaeologists believed that they could find archaeological similarities in the region's ancient cultures that the Bantu-speakers were held to have traversed. Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. But the Bantu farmers didn't swiftly drive hunter-gatherers to oblivion. Genocide obviously never sits well on the national conscience of any country, and so the finer points of definition are usually argued exhaustively. The Shum Laka people survived for at least 1,000 years in the heart of Bantu country. Vaguely the idea was to purify the races under German control, and create thus a race-worthy of European domination. followed by the recent Bantu expansion separating the two regions.One . Furthermore, both the Khoisan and Pygmies still mostly have their own specific Y-DNA haplogroups. No it is a white supremacist talking point that doesn't make a lot of sense. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian. Bearing in mind, however, the likely ramifications of a civil war between Hindus and Muslims in India, it seemed, in the end, the only viable solution. Render date: 2023-03-04T14:32:22.407Z Content may require purchase if you do not have access. It remains a livid international issue, however, and one upon which Turkeys entry into the European Union has traditionally been hinged. Bantu Genocide View source Bantu peoples is used as a general label for the 300-600 ethnic groups in Africa who speak Bantu languages. No genocide to date had been based so completely on myths, on hallucinations, on abstract, nonpragmatic ideology which was then executed by very rational, pragmatic means.. To date, Turkey remains in denial, and the word genocide is excluded from the official description of what took place. The Partition of India is such a case, and while Hindu/Muslim sectarianism lies at the heart of the debate, there is also the question of whether the British washed their hands of India, and walked away knowing that genocide was inevitable. The Bantu Expansion stands for the concurrent dispersal of Bantu languages and Bantu-speaking people from an ancestral homeland situated in the Grassfields region in the borderland between current-day Nigeria and Cameroon. Same reason we don't call the Indo European migrations a genocide. Genetic and Demographic Implications of the Bantu Expansion: Insights Personal communication from Mr Fagg. They expanded and took the land which is exactly what they will do to Somalia soon if Somalis don't put a stop to it. Nonetheless, in the unfathomable complexity of the Anglo-Irish relationship, there are no small number of historians who point the finger at the British government, not so much for acts of commission, but acts of omission. The Bantu languages constitute by far Africa's largest language family. "[26] In some places, genetic evidence suggests that Bantu language expansion was largely a result of substantial population replacement. After a hundred years, the genocide slowly continued, forced to servitude. Some 6.5 million of those were Muslims migrating from India to Pakistan, and 4.7 million Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan to India. In both these stages the Bantu expansion seems to have coincided fairly closely with the spread of the Iron Age; and, if the spread of the Iron Age through the area north of the southern woodlands can now be traced in something like the detail which we already have for Zambia and Rhodesia, the mystery of the Bantu expansion will have been largely unravelled. There is strength in numbers and our Bantu speaking ancestors always had large families consistent with our pro-natalist mindset. This inspired the Bantu to conquer more areas to capture more slaves and expand further . Starving Herero Tribesmen Source: Wikimedia. [34], 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 difficult farming conditions in areas farther from water. Factors that support claims of genocide include the confiscation not just of grain crops, that were needed to feed a growing industrial army, but also the confiscation of all foodstuffs, including livestock and domestic animals. Notable early kingdoms include the Kingdom of the Kongo in present day Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Bunyoro Kitara Kingdom in the Great Lakes region, the Kingdom of Mapungubwe (c.1075c.1220) in present day South Africa, and the Zambezi River, where the Monomatapa kings built the Great Zimbabwe complex. The Khmer Rouge regime was characterized by extreme and indiscriminate brutality. It is described as one of the most momentous events in African history. Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription. These two widely held beliefs are critically assessed here. The ideological underpinning of all of this was simply the Maoist principle of transforming Cambodia into rural and classless society, with a population consigned to labor on collectivized farms. Enter your library card number to sign in. It is thought that Central African Pygmies and Bantus branched out from a common ancestral population c. 70,000 years ago. The raw facts of the Irish Famine are quite simple. "useRatesEcommerce": false He was thus able to interweave his own warped ideology with the mood of a nation. In addition to their stature, they also differ in blood type from their Bantu- and Sudanic-speaking agriculturalist neighbours, and they are probably the earliest . A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions. The Bantu expansion is a hypothesis about the history of the major series of migrations of the original Proto-Bantu-speaking group,[3][4] which spread from an original nucleus around Central Africa across much of sub-Saharan Africa. In total, about 11.2 million people successfully crossed the India-West Pakistan border in different directions, mostly through the Punjab region. This was to ensure that all food produced in Ireland remained in Ireland, guaranteeing that everyone had enough to eat, even during the leanest times. Doctors, teachers, monks, journalists, the wealthy, artists, anyone with an education and ethnic or religious minorities were all singled out for arbitrary execution. With death and destruction occurring on such a vast scale, the relatively minor plight of a fringe minority of Turkish Christians attracted very little attention. Under the rule of both Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, numerous document examples of unnatural mass deaths have been recorded. } In other words, a ridiculous idea with no basis in rational thought was undertaken and executed with brilliant and systematic precision. There are reports that during the last ten years of the Dutch East India Company's rule (1795), 2,504 "Bushmen" were killed, 669 captured and 276 colonists ( Khoikhoi) slain. It was this policy in the end that is credited with saving Ireland from the worst possible consequences of crop failure. . Ethnic Armenian Christians, mainly living in what would today be modern Turkey, became subject to genocide as the old ruling Caliphate of the Ottoman Empire came under the more modernizing influence of the Young Turks. If one was to point the finger at the former Soviet Union for acts of genocide, then one would be able to point in many different directions. However, the US Ambassador to Constantinople, Henry Morgenthau Sr, was able to rouse the attention of the Woodrow Wilson administration, and an enormous amount of money and resource was eventually raised to help Armenian refugees affected by the crisis. Linguistic analysis suggests that the expansion proceeded in two directions: the first went across or along the Northern border of the Congo forest region (towards East Africa),[6] and the second and possibly others went south along the African coast into Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and Angola, or inland along the many south-to-north flowing rivers of the Congo River system. The death toll attributed to the Holodomor runs to between 7 million and 10 million, which dwarves anything we have looked at so far. [30], It is clear that there were human populations in the region at the time of the expansion, and pygmies are their closest living relatives. Tensions and violence increased after the Rwandan Genocide as 1.5 million Hutu refugees fled Rwanda. Bantu Genocide | Alternative History | Fandom The economic suffering of the German people that followed, and the rise of nationalism that this set in motion, created ideal circumstances for a merchant and banking class to attract the attention of a disposed population. When they reached the Zulu shield-wall, they were so tightly bunched they could scarcely fight. Accompanying charcoal carbon-dated to 266 s.c. 120. Was the Great Irish Famine genocide? Other unreliable ethnic groups, such as Greeks and Assyrians, were also sucked into the maelstrom, and are now subject to separate genocide classifications. In 1884, it was agreed among European powers that all expansion into Africa would be by treaty with local, indigenous authority. What followed was an extreme Maoist, Marxist-Leninist movement in Cambodia, and an extreme, and inexplicable antipathy towards intellectuals and professionals. The Bantu Expansion was probably the biggest example of genocide 4in human history. In fact a small amount South African Bantu men have Khoisan specific Y-DNA (including Cushitic pastoralist Y-DNA which is significant among the Khoisan). To date, Turkey remains in denial, and the word genocide is excluded from the official description of what took place. Murdock, G. P., Africa: Its Peoples and their Culture History (New York), 2901.Google Scholar, 10 Greenberg, J. H., Studies in African Linguistic Classification (New Haven, 1955), 40.Google Scholar, 12 Guthrie, Malcolm, Some developments in the pre-history of the Bantu languages, Journal of African History, III (1962), 27382.CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 13 From Mr Bernard Fagg's layer 3 at Taruga, containing iron slag and Nok figurines. No one need ever be reminded that the greatest and least disputed incidence of genocide in modern history was the systematic exterminations of Europes Jews by the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler. Archaeologies of the Bantu Expansion | The Oxford Handbook of African The primary evidence for the Bantu Expansion is linguistic: the diffusion of Bantu languages throughout the continent. These deaths were distributed across all of the most populous regions of Russia, but the greatest impact was felt in Ukraine. It is connected with complex population movements starting north of Central Africa and led to the progressive colonisation of a vast area further south. From Mr Bernard Fagg's layer 3 at Taruga, containing iron slag and Nok figurines. The Ottoman Empire allied with the Central Powers during WWI, and, of course, the German defeat in that war brought the Ottoman Empire down with it. In all probability, however, this was genocide, because it could not have been done without the expectation that death on a mass scale would be the result. In many ways, it defined the British Empire. fall into the classification of genocide. Muslim nationalists then began demanding a two-state solution, which neither the British nor nationalists like Mohandas Mahatma Gandhi particularly wanted. Further east, Bantu-speaking communities had reached the great Central African rainforest, and by 500BC, pioneering groups had emerged into the savannas to the south, in what are now the Democratic Republic of Congo, Angola, and Zambia. As we approach the top of the list, the Cambodian Genocide, the infamous Killing Fields of the 1790s, ranks very highly. Answer (1 of 3): Here we go again with the Bantu Expansion and supposed "genocide" of the Khoi-Khoi and the San of Southern Africa. Was it all kumbaya and holding hands? Postulated millennia-long series of migrations. It is reprinted here with the agreement of the R.S.A.Google Scholar, 2 Johnston, H. H., A survey of the ethnography of Africa: and the former racial and tribal migrations of that continent, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, XLIII (1913), 3912.Google Scholar, 3 Wrigley, C. C., Speculations on the economic prehistory of Africa, Journal of African History, I (1960), 201.Google Scholar, 4 McBurney, C. B. M., The Stone Age of Northern Africa (1960), 234.Google Scholar. False and dangerous equivalency. Many centuries later, around AD 1000, some Eastern Cushitic speakers also settled in northern and coastal Kenya. Numerous individual countries, however, twenty-nine in total, including forty-eight states within the United States, classify what took place as genocide. For over 5,000 years the Eastern, Southeastern, and the Midwestern U.S. were populated by mound-building, Native American cultures that constructed anywhere from tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands of earthen mounds. Hostname: page-component-7fc98996b9-ttbxf the Herero and Namaqua Genocide). Regarding (1), the chapter argues that the Bantu Expansion did involve the actual migration of Bantu speakers but that backward and forward migration occurred after the initial spread and that Bantu languages also expanded through adoption by autochthonous hunter-gatherers. Now the others are minorities this was not at all a targeted effort so there is no reason to call it a genocide. The scope of the Armenian genocide is usually defined as the physical extermination of Armenian Christians living within the geographic boundaries of the Ottoman Empire, between 1915 and 1916. These migrants changed population demographics, spread farming across sub-equatorial Africa, introduced iron technology, and built powerful states that continue to influence the African continent today. Linguistic, archeological and genetic evidence indicates that during the course of the Bantu expansion, "independent waves of migration of western African and East African Bantu-speakers into southern Africa occurred. At the time, the attention of the world tended to be focused on the events of WWI. Probably in the minds of a few individuals who had the power to stop it, it was, but as a systematic government policy, perhaps not. With death and destruction occurring on such a vast scale, the relatively minor plight of a fringe minority of Turkish Christians attracted very little attention. No, it's not. The large-scale expansion of fairly recent language families is one of the reasons for this comparatively low diversity. Yeah, Bantu expanded around 1500 years or so and did a little genociding of the Khoisans and pygmies in the area. Between 1782-1783, a similar crop failure occurred in Ireland, but on that occasion, the British government responded by closing all Irish ports. The dynamics of genocide are rooted in the complex colonial policies of the time. Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. A boundary commission, sponsored by the British government, attempted to divide India along Hindu and Muslim lines. A lot less easy to explain is the national derangement that gripped one half of Cambodia, causing it to react with such violence towards the other. 21128. The Nazi extermination of the Jews, on the other hand, was strictly ideological and remained so until its conclusion. Zulu Warriors in full Battle Regalia Source: i.imgur.com. The name of the country was changed in 1976 to Democratic Kampuchea, and Pol Pot, or Brother Number One, declared the day of victory Year Zero as he set about building his Utopian republic. The indigenous population of the territory comprised dispersed agricultural and pastoral communities belonging to the two major indigenous population groups in southern Africa. Much of this vocabulary is botanical, deals with honey collecting, or is otherwise specialised for the forest and is shared between western Batwa groups.