Because there are so many different groups of people in Africa, a person needs a lingua franca to get around. In northern Africa, Arabic is the common language, whereas in nations that were once colonies of Britain or France, English or French provides a lingua franca. But in much of southern Africa, the common language is native to the African continent.
This common language is Swahili (swah-HEEL-ee), spoken by 49 million people in Kenya, Tanzania, the Congo, and Uganda. Such large numbers for any African language are rare; the average language in Africa has only half a million speakers. But the Bantu language of Swahili provides a common tongue for the mostly Bantu peoples of southern Africa. There are some fifteen other Bantu languages spoken in parts of southern Africa.
Included the Pygmies, a group whose average height was under five feet, who were forced into the less desirable rain forest. There were also the Khoisan (koy-SAHN) peoples, speakers of the so-called “click language”—one can hear it spoken in the 1980 movie The Gods Must Be Crazy, which humorously contrasts Bushman and Western societies. The Bantu peoples drove the Khoisan-speak-ing tribes into the much less favorable Kalahari (kahl-ah-HAHR-ee) Desert.
It is doubtful that the Bantu waged war against the native peoples of these areas; they probably did not have to, since they were the more technologically sophisticated group. By about A. D. 500, the ethnic map of southern Africa was more or less complete. The Bantu controlled the best areas. They would continue to do so until the Europeans arrived more than
1,000 years later.
Developed around the southern African fortress of Zimbabwe (zim-BAHB-way), which flourished from about 1000 to about 1400 A. D.
As with the Americas, African civilization truly came into its own at a time when European civilizations were at a low point. The same was true of the Arab world; in the 600s, Arab armies conquered much of northern Africa, including the area where the Kushite civilization had once been located, in what became the nation of Sudan. In the 1400s, when European civilization experienced a resurgence and Europeans began exploring the rest of the world, the Africans and Native Americans would suffer as a result.
World History
