Bantu didn't spread by waging war - they spread after revolutinizing their agriculture with adoption of iron tools - hoes or jembes - leading to more population. They generally settled on foreste rd highlands with lot of rains using iron tools to clear and cultivate- generally interacting with khoisan (okiek/dorobo) who also like forest for bees & honey & foraging. Around the same time pastoralism was equally revolutinizing the spread of nilotes and cushites....along Africa plains.
But I always thought that Bantus were not warlike.
It's because Termi said they absorbed other groups without resistance.
Maybe a better term would be they absorbed them using soft power. They see what the Bantu is doing and they decide to join them. In Kenya you can even see remnants of that with Sabaots, who I think would have become Luhyas had Kenya been colonized later. I think a good chunk of Bantu "migration" far away from the origin actually consists of local natives just adopting Bantu culture.
That's an interesting theory. I always did wonder how Bantus reached the tips of East and Southern Africa in such a short time (and populated that whole area too). The structure of the bantu languages remains more or less the same but they are sooo different now. I cannot follow luhya languages (though I can catch quite a few bits of Kimaragoli even though I'm not exactly very good at ekeGusii either) or even kyuk. Coastarian ones I guess I could pick them up because of their close association with Swa. I guess it would be like how latin created French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Catalan in the first millennium by mixing with the language of the Gauls of France and their Spanish/Portuguese equivalents (Don't know what they were before). I hear that the Spanish, Catalans and Portuguese can still understand each other, (and even to a smaller extent Italian) but not the French.
It is fascinating indeed. It totally sucks that the Africans themselves have not bothered to expand on this knowledge of themselves that bazungu were able to readily glean. Everything we know about Bantus, Nilotes, Cushites, is generally from what the Europeans were able to gather. We ought to do better than that, with so many linguistics professors in local universities. They just regurgitate.
Indeed, even among Bantus, there are further groupings above what we would normally consider a linguistic tribe. All Ugandan and Rwandan Bantus, Luhya languages and Ekegusii fall under the great lakes Bantu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Lakes_Bantu_languages. I think this group was a result of a direct West to East thrust of the Bantu expansion.
What is interesting is you will see that Maragoli are put in a different group, same group as Kisii, from the rest of the Luhya. Yet, they view themselves as Luhyas, again the power of the colonizer to shape self image. Ultimately, you are who you think you are.
Gikuyu, Meru, Kamba etc form another branch at the same level. They emerged from a group that arrived from the South, having gone South then East then North. You will see a lot of Maasai types absorbed by these groups.
Romance languages are a good and better documented approximation of the Bantu phenomenon. I know native Portuguese speakers have no problem understanding Spanish, but it's a little harder for the Spanish speaker to understand Portuguese.
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