Ella Margaret Shaw
Published: 1973
Total Pages: 40
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About 2000 years ago, dark-skinned negroid people started moving gradually from the north into the African sub-continent, south of the Zambezi River. They brought with them a knowledge of the use of metals, and their way of life was very different from that of the largely nomadic stone-age people who were in southern Africa before them. They possessed domestic animals, as did some of the stone-age people, but in addition they grew food crops, built permanent homes, sometimes in communities of considerable size, and had highly organized social systems. The full story of their migrations, before and after they entered southern Africa is not yet known, but today they are settled in several major groups. Each group consists of a number of smaller groups or tribes, some of which have always been related to it, while others have been absorbed into the larger group at various times. The languages that the various groups speak belong to the Bantu family of languages, hence the term Bantu-speaking, or Bantu, by which the people are known collectively today.