UNESCO Ancient Civilizations of Africa (Editor G. Mokhtar)

Ancient Civilizations of Africa
The Bantu agricultural and iron-using tradition
While pastoralism and the associated fish taboo provided the cultural and
ethnic hallmark of the Kushites in one zone of East Africa during the first
millennium, that of the early Bantu during the following millennium was
the working and use of iron. How or whence this knowledge was obtained
is still unclear: this question is discussed in Chapter 21. Much more
important than this question of origin is the evident fact that the early
Bantu depended on iron and were identified as the people who possessed
its secrets. Probably the earlier peoples of East Africa were unfamiliar with
it. For tools and weapons they had taken suitable stones and worked them
by ancient techniques. For instance, the eastern Rift Valley in the Kushitic
zone is blessed with sources of an unusually fine stone called obsidian
(opaque volcanic glass), from which excellent blades of different sizes were
readily producible for all sorts of purposes, including spear-heads and
probably circumcision-knives. The contemporaneous but distinct communities
living around Lake Victoria, among whom the aquatic tradition
persisted in part, were less fortunate than those in the Rift Valley in the
stones available to them, but succeeded none the less in manufacturing
complex tool-kits from quartz, cherts and other stones with good flaking
properties, as also did the savannah hunters in the regions southward. To
all such varied peoples, the firstcontact with strangers practising an iron
technology must have been a shattering intellectual experience.
The main expansion of the Bantu was vast and fast, not a series of
gradual stages as some have argued. But neither was it a matter of purposeless
nomadic wandering, nor of organized military conquest. It was a
remarkable process of colonization - in the true sense of the word - the
opening up of essentially empty lands. This Bantu expansion did not engulf
the whole of the area considered here. About one-third of East Africa has
remained non-Bantu on account of the resilience and adaptability of some
of the earlier populations especially in the long zone of the eastern Rift
with its old Kushitic populations, augmented during the iron age by the
arrival of certain Nilotic divisions. (See the linguistic map and the preceding
and succeeding sections.)
This is not to say that there has been no interaction between the Bantu
and various of the Kushites and Nilotes in East Africa during these two
thousand years. From time to time considerable intermarriage and
assimilation in both directions must have occurred, as well as cultural
borrowings and economic enrichment of several kinds. The Bantu soon
began supplementing their agricultural diet with the milk and meat of cattle
in those regions with suitable grass and free of tsetse. Among those Bantu
living around Lake Victoria and in the lush upland pastures to the west,
cattle have long been especially important. Conversely the role of grain
agriculture among the Kushitic and Nilotic populations of the Kenya and
northern Tanzania highlands has in time been enhanced, owing to the
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