The Bantu Expansion and the SOAS Network

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Abstract
One difference between linguists and other Africanists seemed to be that others were prepared to jettison one part of their training to help other disciplines, but linguists apparently would not. Was this so, and if so, why?The Bantu expansion has been a problem for historians ever since the recognition by linguists of a single startling fact. During the nineteenth century, the descriptions of African languages available to scholars in Europe grew steadily in number; they also tended to gain in detail, and in accuracy. It thus became increasingly clear that a sinuous line could be traced across the map distinguishing a zone of extremely high diversity in the north from a zone of low diversity in the south. By the 1880s a popularizing writer could claim that this contrast was generally recognized “by students of African languages.” The situation as he described it was that in the northern half of the continent there are bewildering multitudes of diverse tongues belonging to many independent families, and apparently irreducible to a common origin. Yet cross the irregular boundary-line which runs over the continent from 6° N. on the west coast to the Equator on the east coast … and what do we find? Why that the whole of the southern half of Africa, with the exception of the Masai and Galla intrusion in the north-east and the Hottentot enclave in the south-west, is the domain of a single homogeneous family of languages, … differing perhaps less among themselves than do the many offshoots of the Aryan stock.

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