list of figures - Terry Sunderland

1990; Iliffe, 1995). These Bantu languages form a sub-group within the Niger-Congo
family of languages that are relatively homogenous yet are distributed across a vast
area of sub-Saharan Africa. From linguistic studies, it has been determined that the
centre of origin of the Bantu languages is probably the Benue region of Nigeria
(Vansina, 1990; Iliffe, 1995) from which, around 5,000 years ago, this Bantu family
split into two branches: Eastern and Western (ibid.). The former group moved slowly
eastwards along the northern edge of the Congo Basin to the great lakes area of East
Africa whilst western Bantu developed east of the Cross River in the highlands of
western Cameroon.
Around 3,000 years ago, the Western Bantu speakers began to migrate slowly
southwards, reaching as far as, what is now, northern Namibia. During this migration,
pioneer groups broke off, travelling eastwards up the river valleys through the topical
forest, settling as far inland as southern Sudan and the western Zambezi. The
introduction of the banana and plantain, postulated to have occurred around 500 AD
(Vansina, 1990), made this rapid expansion through the tropical forest possible as it
provided the means to farm an otherwise inhospitable environment.
The study of the ancestral Bantu language indicates that at the time of separation,
Bantu speakers made pottery and had begun to farm, yet had not begun to use metals.
Both Bantu groups had words for oil palm and yam and their cultivation, although
there existed no vocabulary for cereal cultivation in Western Bantu until this group’s
expansion reached the savannah areas of east and southern Africa. Most terms for root
and tree cultivation are of western Bantu origin and it is clear that the Western Bantu
vocabulary and system of classification of living things have developed to reflect the
group’s familiarity with their forest surroundings (Guthrie, 1948; Guthrie, 1969-70;
Vansina, 1990; Oliver, 1999).
6.4 BERLIN’S MODEL OF ETHNOBIOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION
6.4.1 Introduction
It has been long recognised that the presence of hierarchically arranged folk
taxonomies is probably universal and, as such, these are shared by a wide range of
unrelated human societies (Conklin, 1962; Berlin, 1973; Berlin et al., 1973; Berlin,
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