Bantu Migration Reaches Southern Africa

Bantu-speaking peoples, having originated in the Cameroon-Nigeria highlands millennia earlier, reached southern Africa by approximately 500 CE. Migrating along eastern and western corridors through the continent, they brought iron-smelting technology, agricultural practices including millet and sorghum cultivation, and a family of closely related languages now numbering over 400. Iron tools enabled forest clearance and intensive farming across diverse ecological zones. By this period, Bantu farming communities occupied territories from the Congo basin to the eastern Cape.