I'm another bantu on Hacker News but living in the US. The migration continues...
Lol. I'm another one from Burundi. East Africa.
How the Bantu people surged across two-thirds of Africa
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Re: How the Bantu people surged across two-thirds of Africa
#22Very interesting read. I am a Bantu from Kenya and I'd like to tack on something to this. First of all, it's incredible how intellectually insatiable the HN community is; I never imagined a post like this would end up on the HN's home page because of how niche it is. I happen to speak up to 4 languages - Eng, Swahili, my native language Kikuyu and very rusty French. It may surprise you to know that when I listen to o…
What do you think has been going into Burundi and Rwanda where Hutu ( Bantu) are up against Tutsis (Nilotes) ?
I really hope you guys do not go the hard days we went trough!
Re: How the Bantu people surged across two-thirds of Africa
#23Since we also talk about languages here. I once found a post in African ( Afrikaans), I thought it was strangely written Dutch, then saw the tld and looked it up. Then learned that Afrikaans is based on Dutch. It's really funny that you can read the main language of a country so far away, since Dutch isn't that spoken by that many people ( 28 million)
Nobody here calls Afrikaans anything other than Afrikaans. Certainly not 'African'. Furthermore, South Africa is a predominantly anglophone country, with 11 official languages. Afrikaans isn't even one of the top 2 mother tongues. I'm an English speaking white South African who learned Afrikaans at school. I can understand the language. I almost always default to speaking English with Afrikaans speakers. Continued use of Afrikaans is a contentious issue in South African university politics. To grotesquely oversimplify, it is perceived as the language of the oppressor, and a means of control and exclusion. See [1].
_Interestingly_, however, Paul Le Roux [0] resented having to learn Afrikaans, seeing it as a dated, dead language.
Re: How the Bantu people surged across two-thirds of Africa
#24One of the more pernicious myths that continues to sustain ideological racism in South Africa (and its more vile outposts on the internet) is the terra nullius equivalent: that whites and Bantu-speaking blacks arrived in South Africa at the same time, and therefore large-scale dispossession of the black population didn't take place with the outward expansion of white colonials. The point about intermarriage with the…
You call it intermarriage between the San and the Bantu implying a nice peaceful union between the newcomers and the existing population. Do you know for certain that was how it was, the article didn't use the word intermarriage?
How do you know it was violent? We don't know for sure about a genocide, but we do know that the distinctive click consonants in some of the bigger South African Bantu languages were borrowed from Khoisan languages. If there was a genocide of Khoisan by Bantu speakers, how would these unusual sounds have permeated into the Bantu languages, along with the genes?
Of course, there is no written history, but it is an interesting contrast that Afrikaans-which recorded history unequivocally shows spreading in lockstep with violent dispossession-hasn't got any click consonants, despite developing in an area where click languages predominated (SW Cape), and despite having a fair amount of Khoisan stock in a big chunk of its native speaking population (Cape Coloureds).
Re: How the Bantu people surged across two-thirds of Africa
#25One of the more pernicious myths that continues to sustain ideological racism in South Africa (and its more vile outposts on the internet) is the terra nullius equivalent: that whites and Bantu-speaking blacks arrived in South Africa at the same time, and therefore large-scale dispossession of the black population didn't take place with the outward expansion of white colonials. The point about intermarriage with the…
The Khoisan have occupied much of Africa for much of human history. [1] I don't know exactly how the Bantus displaced the people that they came across, but I suspect some form of foul play. 1: http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6692
How would you explain the integration of Khoisan click consonants in Bantu languages if foul play was involved?
Re: How the Bantu people surged across two-thirds of Africa
#26One of the more pernicious myths that continues to sustain ideological racism in South Africa (and its more vile outposts on the internet) is the terra nullius equivalent: that whites and Bantu-speaking blacks arrived in South Africa at the same time, and therefore large-scale dispossession of the black population didn't take place with the outward expansion of white colonials. The point about intermarriage with the…
The Khoisan have occupied much of Africa for much of human history. [1] I don't know exactly how the Bantus displaced the people that they came across, but I suspect some form of foul play. 1: http://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms6692
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Re: How the Bantu people surged across two-thirds of Africa
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
You call it intermarriage between the San and the Bantu implying a nice peaceful union between the newcomers and the existing population. Do you know for certain that was how it was, the article didn't use the word intermarriage?
How do you know it was violent? We don't know for sure about a genocide, but we do know that the distinctive click consonants in some of the bigger South African Bantu languages were borrowed from Khoisan languages. If there was a genocide of Khoisan by Bantu speakers, how would these unusual sounds have permeated into the Bantu languages, along with the genes? Of course, there is no written history, but it is an int…
>How do you know it was violent?
I don't but most peoples, like most animals are territorial and resist the movement of others into their territory.
Your language theory is interesting. But then the english language as spoken in many areas where it would be the language of the non-peaceful invader inherits from the local language. And getting on for half the words in the english language itself were adopted from the French language of the Normans invaders.
Re: How the Bantu people surged across two-thirds of Africa
#28Since we also talk about languages here. I once found a post in African ( Afrikaans), I thought it was strangely written Dutch, then saw the tld and looked it up. Then learned that Afrikaans is based on Dutch. It's really funny that you can read the main language of a country so far away, since Dutch isn't that spoken by that many people ( 28 million)
Nobody here calls Afrikaans anything other than Afrikaans. Certainly not 'African'. Furthermore, South Africa is a predominantly anglophone country, with 11 official languages. Afrikaans isn't even one of the top 2 mother tongues. I'm an English speaking white South African who learned Afrikaans at school. I can understand the language. I almost always default to speaking English with Afrikaans speakers. Continued us…
> South Africa is a predominantly anglophone country, with 11 official languages. Afrikaans isn't even one of the top 2 mother tongues.
Yes but it's 3rd after Zulu and Xhosa.
And I find it amusing that you say that SA is a predominantly anglophone country, when more people speak Afrikaans in South Africa than English. [0]
+-----------+-------------+-------------+------------+
| Language | L1 speakers | L2 speakers | Total |
+-----------+-------------+-------------+------------+
| Afrikaans | 7,218,390 | 10,300,000 | 17,518,390 |
+-----------+-------------+-------------+------------+
| English | 4,890,000 | 11,000,000 | 15,890,000 |
+-----------+-------------+-------------+------------+
Re: How the Bantu people surged across two-thirds of Africa
#29I'm "double Bantu" - as a Kenyan I speak our national language Swahili, and I'm also from the Bantu Bukusu tribe of Western Kenya on my father's side. This migration history is even more complex because the migration was in waves - Bantu who went to South Africa later migrated north again, meeting Bantu who were already there from earlier migration. You can tell this from the fact that some southern African languages…
This is really, really interesting, especially considering how different Venda is from languages like Xhosa or Zulu, which are geographically much closer than Kenya (is Bukusu the language as well as the tribe?)
Re: How the Bantu people surged across two-thirds of Africa
#30Since we also talk about languages here. I once found a post in African ( Afrikaans), I thought it was strangely written Dutch, then saw the tld and looked it up. Then learned that Afrikaans is based on Dutch. It's really funny that you can read the main language of a country so far away, since Dutch isn't that spoken by that many people ( 28 million)
Afrikaans isn't the "main language" of South Africa. It is 1 of 11 official languages, 9 of which are Bantu languages. Until 1994, it was one of two official languages (along with English). I've also never seen it referred to by the name "African". One of the main causes of the 16 June 1976 Soweto riots was an attempt by the apartheid government to change the medium of instruction in black schools from English to Afr…
> Afrikaans isn't the "main language" of South Africa.
@NicoJuicy might have meant to say "common tongue." I can only communicate effectively English and the pervasiveness of Afrikaans still gives me problems - even though it is currently being displaced as the common tongue.