A HISTORICAL-LINGUISTIC APPROACH TO THE SUBSISTENCE OF THE FIRST BANTU SPEAKERS SOUTH OF THE RAINFOREST: THE BANANA CASE

The Bantu Expansion is the principal linguistic, cultural and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa. Different disciplines have dealt with the question of how the relatively young Bantu language family (ca. 5000 years) could spread over disproportionally large parts of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa.

The prevailing synthesis is a model in which the Bantu language dispersal is conceived as resulting from a single migratory macro-event driven by agriculture. However, many questions about the movement and subsistence of ancestral Bantu speakers are still open. Through the BantuFirst project, archaeologists, palaeobotanists and linguists form a cross-disciplinary team to carry out evidence-based research on the first Bantu-speaking settlements south of the rainforest. Their goal is to acquire a new transversal view on the interconnections between human migration, language spread, climate change and early farming in Late Holocene Central Africa in order to improve our current understanding of the Bantu Expansion.

We focus here on the project’s historical-linguistic research devoted to the West-Western branch of the Bantu family. Those languages are spoken southern Gabon, southern Congo, south-western DRC and northern Angola including Cabinda. We focus on the project’s objective of expanding existing specialized reconstructed West-Western Bantu lexicon, especially in the domains of subsistence and land use strategies of ancestral West-Western Bantu speakers. Specifically, we present preliminary results on the banana (Musa sp.) case in Central-Africa, based on the comparison of vernacular names for banana species in West-Western Bantu languages. This topic is especially relevant because it is still not clear when, how and by whom bananas were introduced in Africa. With our research, we intend to shed new light on these questions and to better understand: (i) the role that bananas played in the diet of early Bantu speakers; and (ii) how banana exploitation contributed to the Bantu expansion through Central-Africa.