College Board Themes
1. State Building, Expansion & Conflict
The Bantu didn't have much of a political structure, but as time passes and conflicts with neighboring people grew bigger they needed to create a military with lead to a more structural government.
2. Creation, Expansion & Interaction of Economic Systems
Because of the spread of bananas, it allowed the Bantu people to expand to places they couldn't before. Like the areas with a lot of trees because they couldn't grow yams and millet, but because they found bananas they couldn't expand to forested areas.
The Bantu didn't have much of a political structure, but as time passes and conflicts with neighboring people grew bigger they needed to create a military with lead to a more structural government.
2. Creation, Expansion & Interaction of Economic Systems
Because of the spread of bananas, it allowed the Bantu people to expand to places they couldn't before. Like the areas with a lot of trees because they couldn't grow yams and millet, but because they found bananas they couldn't expand to forested areas.
Bantu Migration
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Bantu Agriculture
- Increased more rapidly than the hunting-and-gathering populations
- Increased supplies of food and supported larger populations
Iron Metallurgy
- Started to produced iron
- Some scholars believed that merchants from North Africa introduced iron metallurgy but others argues that the Bantu people independently discovered how to smelt iron
- Iron production appeared among the Bantu
- Iron tools enabled the Bantu to clear land and expand the zone of agriculture more efficiently than before
- Brought population growth and increased momentum to the Bantu migration
Bananas
- Introduction of bananas to Africa made another big impact on the Bantu migration
- Domesticated in Southeast Asia, bananas entered Africa by the sea-lanes across the Indian Ocean
- At first Malay seafarers colonized the island of Madagascar and established banana cultivation (also brought Southeast Asian cultural traditions)
- From Madagascar bananas easily made its way to the East African mainland
- Bananas provided a nutritious supplement to Bantu diets
- Enabled to expand into heavily forested regions, where yams and millet do not grow very well but bananas do
- Increased the supply of food available
- Enriched their diets
- Allowed expand more rapidly
- Population grew from 3.5 million to 22 million with the help of iron metallurgy and bananas
POLITICAL Organization
- Developed increasingly complex forms of government that enabled them to organize their existing societies more efficiently
- "Stateless society" refers to one form of social organization, which means they did not depend on elaborate hierarchy of officials or a bureaucratic apparatus to administer their affairs
- Governed themselves mostly though family and kinship groups
- Usually settled in villages with populations averaging about one hundred people
- Male heads of families created a village's ruling council, which decided the public affairs for the entire group
- The most important of the family heads looked over the village as a chief and represented the settlement when it dealt with neighboring peoples
- A group of villages constituted a district, which became the principal focus of ethnic loyalties
- Usually there was no chief or larger government for the district, and instead village chiefs negotiated on matters concerning two or more villages
- Individual villages, family, and kinship groups disciplined their own members as necessary
- Stateless societies faced difficult challenges such as population growth, strained resources, and few lands available to settle
- Conflicts between villages and districts became more frequent and more intense
- Increased conflict caused the Bantu communities to organize military forces for both offensive and defensive purposes
- Military organization caused the development of more formal structures of government
- Many districts fell under the leadership of powerful chiefs, who overrode kinship
- Some of these chiefs conquered their neighbors and made their lands into small kingdoms such as Ife and Benin in western Nigeria
- Dynamic kingdoms emerged and organized the public affairs of large territories
Kongo
- Population pressure and military challenges encouraged the formation of small states embracing a few villages each in the valley of the Congo River
- Conflict between these small states had resulted in the emergence of larger regional principalities
- One of these principalities overcame its neighbors and built the kingdom of Kongo
- Central government of Kongo included the king and officials who oversaw military, judicial, and financial affairs
- Beneath the central government were six provinces administered by governors
- Each supervised several districts administered by subordinate officials
- Villages ruled by chiefs provided local government
- Kongo was perhaps the most tightly centralized of the early Bantu kingdoms
- Stateless societies did not disappears with the emergence of formal states