Answer:
The Bantu expansion is the name for a postulated millennia-long series of migrations of speakers of the original proto-Bantu language group. The primary evidence for this expansion has been linguistic, namely that the languages spoken in sub-Equatorial Africa are remarkably similar to each other.
Explanation:
It seems likely that the expansion of the Bantu-speaking people from their core region in West Africa began around 1000 BCE. The western branch possibly followed the coast and the major rivers of the Congo system southward, reaching central Angola by around 500 BCE.
Further east, Bantu-speaking communities had reached the great Central African rainforest, and by 500 BCE pioneering groups had emerged into the savannas to the south, in what are now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola, and Zambia.
Another stream of migration, moving east by 1000 BCE, was creating a major new population center near the Great Lakes of East Africa. Pioneering groups had reached modern KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa by CE 300 along the coast, and the modern Limpopo Province (formerly Northern Transvaal) by 500 CE.
Before the expansion of farming and pastoralist African peoples, Southern Africa was populated by hunter-gatherers and earlier pastoralists. The Bantu expansion first introduced Bantu peoples to Central, Southern, and Southeast Africa, regions they had previously been absent from. The proto-Bantu migrants in the process assimilated and/or displaced a number of earlier inhabitants.
The relatively powerful Bantu-speaking states on a scale larger than local chiefdoms began to emerge in the regions when the Bantu peoples settled from the 13th century onward. By the 19th century, groups with no previous distinction gained political and economic prominence.
