Saharan and Sub-Saharan Africa: Nilo-Saharan

and Niger-Congo

Nilo-Saharan

We now move south toward sub-Saharan Africa to examine, in the case of the Nilo-Saharan family, one of the likely predecessors to the remarkable domination of Northern Africa by Afroasiatic and especially Semitic languages in the past few millennia. The Nilo-Saharan language family is very diverse, so much so that some linguists refuse to accord it true family status. It has a rather spotty and stretched-out distribution that seems to show clear evidence of overlay by the recent spreads of Semitic and Niger-Congo languages (Figure 10.3).

In a paper written over two decades ago, Nicholas David (1982) equated the spread of the Sudanic branches of Nilo-Saharan with the development of sorghum cultivation and cattle and goat herding. Modern archaeology would deny a truly domesticated status to sorghum at such an early date, but cultivation of wild forms is not at all unlikely. The most detailed scheme for Nilo-Saharan unfolding has since been developed by Christopher Ehret (1993, 1997, 2000, 2003). This favors an ultimate origin for Proto-Nilo-Saharan during the terminal Pleistocene along the Middle Nile, amongst hunter-gatherer populations who possibly began their first phase of expansion with the improving postglacial climate. According to Ehret, the Northern Sudanic branch of Nilo-Saharan then acquired cattle herding by about 9000 BC, together with potterymaking. Plant cultivation and sheep/goat herding appeared slightly later, by about 7000 BC, when cultivation was first adopted by the Central Sudanic populations. After 5000 ac this Saharan agropastoral complex, associated by this time with both Nilo-Saharan and Cushitic (Afroasiatic) populations, began to spread south with increasing Saharan desiccation, eventually to reach Lake Turkana in Kenya by about 3000 BC. Further expansion within East Africa by Nilotic speakers within the NiloSaharan family, fueled in Ehret's view by a successful warlike ideology, has continued into recent centuries (Ehret

2003:171).

Ehret's chronologies correlate with the archaeological record (see chapter 5) for early Holocene cattle management and pottery-making in the Sahara, even if there are no archaeological indications that any of the early Holocene sorghums or millets were actually domesticated. The most interesting question concerns the ancient extent of Nilo-Saharan, prior to the incursions of Afroasiatic and Niger-Congo languages. Did Nilo-Saharan languages once cover the whole Sahara? Or just the eastern portions where they are found today? And if the latter, what languages were once spoken in the western Sahara? Niger-Congo? We do not have answers to these questions. But it is important to reflect on the suggestion that Nilo-Saharan, or at least its Sudanic subgroup, could in the first instance have been another, albeit very shadowy, example of a farming (or herding)/language dispersal.

Niger-Congo, with Bantu

The Niger-Congo language family is largest in the world in terms of number of languages - 1,436 according to one source, with possibly 300 million speakers (Williamson and Blench 2000). The whole family, and especially its Bantu subgroup, covers a vast area of sub-Saharan Africa with almost no survivals of substratum languages and isolates, except for the Khoisan languages in the far southwest of the continent, and the Hadza, Sandawe, and South Cushitic languages in Tanzania. The Bantu languages in particular can be clearly subgrouped owing to the recency and phenomenal extent of their spread.

The area of greatest subgroup diversity of the Niger-Congo languages is in West Africa (Figure 10.5), and this is clearly where the whole family first developed. In this section we will be mainly concerned with the Bantu subgroup owing to the enormous extent of its spread - the remaining subgroups to the west are greater in time depth. Roger Blench (1993, 1999) suggests that the original Proto-Niger-Congo vocabulary was probably pre-agricultural, thus the initial existence of the family might have been somewhere amongst a sprachbunde of early Holocene hunting and gathering populations spread quite widely throughout West Africa. In terms of rough estimates from glottochronology, this phase should predate 5000 BC, long before any signs of agriculture appear in the archaeological record. Niger-Congo at base, therefore, is not an agriculturalist language family, even though its enormous expansion east of the Niger River was without doubt agriculturally driven.

Figure 10.5 The major subgroups of the Niger-Congo family. Courtesy Roger Blench.

The major spreads of the agriculturalist Niger-Congo subgroups, according to the majority of linguists, have occurred within the past 5,000 years. The most significant involved the Bantu-related subgroups. Proto-Benue-Congo, for

instance, has a reconstructed agricultural vocabulary. The slightly younger Proto-Bantu, with a timedepth close to 3,000-4,000 years in terms of the archaeological record, had terms for oil palm, yams, beans, groundnuts, dog, goat, pottery, and pigs (or perhaps wild warthogs according to Vansina 1990). At this stage there were no iron tools, cattle, cereals, or Southeast Asian crops such as bananas and taro in the Bantu homeland region. But it is clear that the eventual Bantu expansion was later to be assisted greatly by these highly significant technological and economic introductions, all of which became available in eastern Africa just before the most rapid phase of Eastern Bantu expansion during the first millennium AD.

The Bantu speakers originated in Cameroon, perhaps initially in grassland areas north of the rain forest (see page 107 for pertinent archaeological data). There appears to have been an early separationinto Western and Eastern subgroups, prior to 1000 Bc, and this is visible in Clare Holden's (2002) family tree for the Bantoid and Bantu languages shown in Figure 10.6. The Eastern Bantu groups began to spread eastward along the northern fringes of the rainforest, to reach Lake Victoria by about 1000 BC. The Western Bantu, with pottery, oil palms, and yams, were perhaps moving southward into the West African rain forest at about the same time, eventually emerging into the savannas of Angola. The arrival of Asian bananas during the first millennium BC probably stimulated this movement, such that the rain-forest region was quite densely settled by Western Bantu farmers by AD 500-1000. Jan Vansina (1990:257) offers a mechanism for the Western Bantu spread close to my own model of "founder rank enhancement" for Austronesians (Bellwood 1996d), suggesting that "emigration became preferable to a continued life as a perpetual junior in an overcrowded homeland."

Christopher Ehret (1997, 1998, 2000) has recently offered a very detailed linguistically based appraisal of Eastern Bantu dispersal. The Eastern Bantu who entered the Great Rift Valley of East Africa about 3,000 years ago came into contact with cattle herders and millet cultivators speaking Cushitic and Nilo-Saharan languages, and also with Khoisan-speaking hunters and gatherers whose Hadza and Sandawe descendants still occupy small areas southeast of Lake Victoria. From the former groups they adopted sorghum and pearl millet to add to their predominantly tuberous domesticated plant roster. They also acquired iron metallurgy, and a little later, by the beginning of the first

millennium AD, they added cattle, sheep, and donkeys, together with Southeast Asian crops and domesticated Asian chickens. The result was to be one of the most rapid episodes of farming spread in world history.

Questions arise as to how many separate directional "streams" of population movement occurred within the Bantu dispersal as a whole, and this issue was raised from the archaeological perspective in chapter 5. Of the linguists, Christopher Ehret favors two separate dialect continua spreading side by side in the southern expansion of Eastern Bantu, down the Great Rift Valley and through East Africa. He calls these the Kaskazi and Kusi dialect continua, and plots their spreads southward toward the Zambesi between 700 and 200 BC. Eventually, speakers of these dialects and their descendants traveled over 3,000 kilometers in under a millennium, from Kenya into Mozambique. Jan Vansina (1995) appears to favor a more complex pattern of spread, more like a continuously expanding backward-and-forward mesh of related communities, rather than a stream-like process.

This debate may reflect little more than differences of scale. Vansina's reconstruction is acceptable on the local village scale, since over a decade or so any distances moved might not have been very great. But an early computer demographic simulation by Collett (1982), based on the huge distances of spread and the relatively short time depths available, suggested that quite large groups might on occasion have moved or leapfrogged over large distances. Clare Holden's (2002) maximum parsimony (tree building) computational study, using 95 basic vocabulary items from 75 Bantoid and Bantu languages, indicates that the Eastern Bantu languages have a unique common ancestor (Western Bantu ones apparently do not), and that this common ancestor spread consistently through adjacent geographical regions with little borrowing between languages once they were in place. In other words, the Eastern Bantu family tree represents differentiation in situ since initial settlement, with little subsequent interference through areal processes.

Overall, the Bantu dispersal was one of the most dramatic examples of language/ farming dispersal in world history, and there is quite remarkable agreement between the archaeological and linguistic records on its reality.