Academic Reading — Test 124

Reading passage

Among the most far-reaching population movements in human history is the dispersal of Bantu-speaking peoples across much of sub-Saharan Africa. Over the course of several thousand years, communities speaking related languages spread from a relatively small homeland into territories that today stretch from the equatorial forests to the southern tip of the continent. The term "Bantu" does not describe a single race or a unified empire; rather, it refers to a large family of closely related languages and, by extension, to the many distinct societies that have come to speak them. The scale of the process was remarkable, yet it unfolded gradually, through the slow movement of farming communities rather than through any organised campaign of conquest. Linguists generally locate the original Bantu homeland in the borderlands between present-day Nigeria and Cameroon, in West-Central Africa. From this region, the languages diverged and travelled in several directions. One broad stream moved southwards and eastwards through and around the dense rainforests of the Congo Basin; another is thought to have skirted the forest margins before turning towards the lakes of East Africa. Reconstructing these pathways is difficult, because the movements left few written records and the environments through which people passed have changed considerably. Scholars therefore rely on indirect evidence, combining the study of language with the findings of archaeology, and, more recently, with the analysis of human genetics. The comparison of related languages has proved especially valuable. By examining shared vocabulary, researchers can infer something of the world that early Bantu speakers inhabited. Words reconstructed for the ancestral language include terms for goats, for certain crops, and for the working of metal, which suggests that the communities carrying these languages possessed a particular set of skills. Crucially, the chronology of the expansion was bound up with the spread of farming. The ability to cultivate crops such as yams, and later cereals, allowed populations to grow and to settle in places that hunter-gatherers had used only sparingly. Iron tools, once they became available, made the clearing of woodland and the tilling of soil far more efficient than before. It would, however, be a mistake to picture the expansion as a single wave sweeping across an empty land. Sub-Saharan Africa was already inhabited, and the incoming farmers encountered established communities of hunter-gatherers and, in some regions, of herders. The nature of these encounters varied widely. In certain places the newcomers and the existing inhabitants appear to have lived alongside one another, exchanging goods, ideas and, over time, members of their respective groups. Elsewhere the spread of farming gradually displaced older ways of life, as land was given over to fields and pasture. Genetic studies of present-day populations reveal traces of this mixing, showing that ancestry in many regions is a blend rather than a simple replacement of one people by another. The pace of the expansion was uneven, and geography played a decisive part. The humid equatorial forest presented a formidable barrier, for the crops that thrived in open country fared poorly beneath a dense canopy, and grazing animals were vulnerable to disease carried by the tsetse fly. Progress through such regions was correspondingly slow. By contrast, the open grasslands and savannahs of eastern and southern Africa offered conditions far better suited to farming and herding, and here the movement could proceed more rapidly. Rivers served as useful corridors, guiding settlement along their banks, while highland areas with reliable rainfall became favoured destinations. The southern limit of the expansion was set, in part, by climate: in the drier south-west, where rainfall was too low and unreliable for the cultivation of tropical cereals, the advance of farming communities came to a halt. By roughly fifteen hundred years ago, communities speaking Bantu languages had reached the southern regions of the continent, completing one of the longest migrations of its kind. The legacy of this process is plainly visible today. Several hundred Bantu languages are now spoken by a large share of Africa's population, among them Swahili, Zulu and Shona, and the cultural and economic practices that accompanied the expansion shaped the societies of an entire subcontinent. Scholars continue to debate the finer points of timing and route, and new evidence regularly refines the picture. What is no longer in doubt is the broad outline: a gradual, transformative movement of people, languages and ways of living that reshaped the human geography of half a continent.