6 - The emergence of Bantu Africa

Summary

STONE AGE FOOD PRODUCTION

In Africa south of the Equator the period from 500 BC until AD 1000 was first and foremost the period which saw the change to food production. Before 500 BC there may have been a little deliberate ‘vegeculture’, or intentional planting of vegetable foods, but most food was either hunted or gathered. After AD 1000, though people still hunted and gathered, most of their food came from agriculture and stock-raising, the emphasis in the economy depending largely on ecological factors. This transition to food production coincided, more or less, with the transition from the Stone to the Iron Age. On present evidence it would seem safe to say that before 500 BC no metal tools were in use, and also that after AD 1000 Stone Age hunters only flourished within limited enclaves in parts of the Congo basin, East Africa and southern Africa, with iron being used elsewhere from the Equator to the Cape of Good Hope Only somewhat more speculatively, it may be surmised that these 1,500 years saw not only a great increase in the human population of this, part of the continent, but also a considerable change in its physical type. Before 500 BC the most widespread type of man had been the Bush physical type, most successfully adapted to hunting in the open savannas and drier woodlands of eastern and southern Africa. After AD 1000 the predominant type of man was the Negro, adapted originally to hunting, gathering and perhaps also to vegeculture, in the wetter woodlands of West and western Central Africa, but which became proficient in agriculture and stock-raising and spread rapidly over the whole sub-continent except for one small corner in the southwest.