UNESCO Ancient Civilizations of Africa (Editor G. Mokhtar)

Ancient Civilizations of Africa
Kalahari environment of the San, were the populations significantly
different and there the difference must be explained by genetic isolation.
In areas like the Sahelian belt and on the fringes of north-east Africa and in
Madagascar there is a mixture between largely Negro populations and
populations which developed independently of those to the south such as
the Malayo-Polynesians in the case of Madagascar, and peoples akin to those
of the Mediterranean periphery and south-west Asia in north-eastern Africa
and the Sahara.
The contribution of linguistics
Crucial to an understanding of the early iron age in sub-Saharan Africa
is an appreciation of the linguistic background. Most archaeologists have
had to cite linguistic evidence in order to interpret their own data. Two
principal sets of events concern us in the period under review: first,the
fragmentation of the Congo-Kordofanian language family, to use Greenberg's
term, 6 and secondly, the dispersion of the Bantu-speaking peoples,
who now comprise more than 90 per cent of the peoples south of a line drawn
from the Bight of Biafra to the East African coast around Malindi. We
know very little about the firstset of events. All that can be said about
them is that the Kordofanian languages are old, relatively numerous, often
spoken by very small, in some cases minuscule, groups of people, with
each language distinct from its neighbours and with the whole comprised
within the modern province of Kordofan in the republic of
Sudan and principally concentrated around the Nuba Hills. The Kordofanian
languages have diverged widely from the Niger-Congo languages
and are isolated from the linguistic groups around them. Nothing
useful can be said about the time scale involved in the separation
of the Kordofanian from the Niger-Congo dialects of the proto-Congo-
Kordofanian family except that it probably predates —10 000 to —8000.
The fragmentation of the Niger-Congo languages may be related to the
gradual expansion of peoples south from the Sahel with the growing
desiccation of the Sahara. Painter 7 has put a time scale of around —6000
to —3000 on the fragmentation but there are other views. Armstrong 8
has suggested that the languages of southern Nigeria are as much as 10 000
years old which implies a much earlier movement to the south. Both views
could of course be right with some of the Niger-Congo language
speakers having broken away from the main group and later having become
isolated in a forest environment. These are perhaps the linguistic counterparts
of the Iwo-Eluru proto-Negro inhabitants. Other Niger-Congo
speakers spread later from the Sahel, once an agricultural way of life was
6. cf. Volume I, Chapter 12.
7. C. Painter, pp. 58-66.
8. R. G. Armstrong.
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