Introduction (Ferran cabrero)

The Bantu, who number more than eighty million, are those African peoples belonging to a group speaking several very homogeneous languages. There are more than 400 Bantu languages, all of which come from the same ancestral linguistic root known as "proto-Bantu". Kiswahili is the most widespread of the Bantu languages and is considered a lingua franca for some of the approximately five million people living in the countries of the east coast of Africa.

The Bantu-speakers moved south from their homeland in the Great Lakes region in about BC 1000, in one of the largest migrations in human history. It seems that this population movement, which was of a massive scale but drawn out over time and sometimes reversed, continued until the third or fourth century AD.

Since then, the Bantu have occupied the region from the equator down as far as Port Elizabeth in South Africa. At the beginning of European colonisation, Portuguese sailors were surprised at the linguistic similarities between the inhabitants of the kingdom of the Congo and those of the east coast of Africa. Apart from the linguistic similarities, though, the Bantu differ in ways that make it difficult to speak of a Bantu "culture".

The Bantu peoples belong to at least two large cultural groups. Among the people making up the eastern Bantu block are the Xhosa, the Zulu, the Kikuyu and the Shona. The western Bantu include the Herero, the Fang and the Tonga. The Bantu form the basis of the population of the Republic of South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Angola, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, the largest group in the territory of the Democratic Republic of Congo, north-west Namibia and southern Cameroon and Uganda.

While it is true that the Bantu languages are not in danger of extinction, nowadays the different Bantu peoples have to face the challenge of international trends in politics, the economy and the media, which do not often promote the preservation of local values, practices or institutions. Traditional community cultural traditions of their own clash with the individualism, the consumer society and the culture of banality that the West provides and attempts to impose as the only reality.

It is specially worth mentioning the armed conflicts in this region, which have increased since the fall of the Berlin wall. Far from the equilibrium of the Cold War, the geopolitical trend of installing and removing governments according to the economic interests of, especially, France and Britain, the old colonial powers in the region, and now the United States, has in recent years stirred up inter-ethnic and inter-state wars, with thousands of civilian victims and disastrous consequences for the fragile economies of countries that occupy the lowest positions in the UNO's index of human development.

This situation of chronic conflict and unequal cultural confrontation, which started with European colonialism in the nineteenth century, though it has got worse with the use of new technologies, has led to a loss of identity and the breakdown of many African societies. The loss of the abia as a form of amusement and social interrelation unique to the Bantu peoples is just one example.