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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   27467 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 20, 2023

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Bantu-maximization

Not being familiar with this term, I had to look up "so what is so bad about the Bantu, anyway?"

Turns out that they were a migrant population that displaced hunter-gatherers and pastoralists, developed agriculture, and smelted iron:

Another stream of migration, having moved east by 3,000 years ago (1000 BC), was creating a major new population center near the Great Lakes of East Africa, where a rich environment supported a dense population. The Urewe culture dominated the Great Lakes region between 650BC and 550BC. It was one of Africa's oldest iron-smelting centres. By the first century BC, Bantu speaking communities in the great lakes region developed iron forging techniques that enabled them to produce carbon steel.

Huh. What was that again about civilisation arising out of agriculturalists, and science/technology coming with the use of iron?

The peoples of other continents (sub-Saharan Africans, Indigenous people of the Americas, Aboriginal Australians, New Guineans, and the original inhabitants of tropical Southeast Asia) have been largely conquered, displaced and in some extreme cases – referring to Native Americans, Aboriginal Australians, and South Africa's indigenous Khoisan peoples – largely exterminated by farm-based societies such as Eurasians and Bantu. He believes this is due to these societies' technological and immunological advantages, stemming from the early rise of agriculture after the last ice age.

The apartheid government in South Africa tended to refer to South African blacks as "Bantu" - mostly accurately, although the small number of remaining pure-bred Khoisan got lumped in with them - hence the names of apartheid-era laws like the Bantu Homelands Citizenship Act (which created the Bantustans). My experience is anyone who uses the term "Bantu" outside linguistic contexts (where it refers to a group of southern African languages) is dog-whistling support for apartheid.

That goes double for people like OP who use the term to refer to blacks who are not Bantu (or, to use modern politically-correct terminology, whose ancestors did not speak Bantu languages) - the vast majority of ADOS African-Americans have roots in west Africa, not southern Africa. So do most, but by no means all, recent African immigrants to Anglosphere countries.

Most African slaves in America were imported from Bantu speaking parts of west Africa. The vast majority of sub Saharan Africa is Bantu speaking; Southern Africa particularly so, but not uniquely.

Per Wikipedia the boundary between Bantu and other Niger-Congo family languages is near the Nigeria-Cameroon border, with Igbo and Yoruba being non-Bantu. About 60% of the Atlantic slave trade took slaves from modern Nigeria and points west, and so would not have been Bantu speakers. The other 40% came from Portuguese Angola (which is Bantu), and mostly ended up in Brazil.

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