Malcolm Guthrie and the Reconstruction of Bantu Prehistory

As to the scientific method,… it consist in the careful and often laborious classification of facts, in the comparison of their relationships and sequences, and finally in the discovery… of a brief statement or formula , which in a few words resumes the whole range of facts. Poor Pearson! His punishment was to have practised what he preached.… The Bantu expansion is one of the most important large-scale problems in African culture history -- an epic enacted over two or three thousand years and ten million square kilometers, by a cast not merely of thousands, but of many millions. By definition, the problem is primarily linguistic, but it cannot fail to engage the interest of other Africanists. The evidence arising from the comparative study of the Bantu languages has to be collated with evidence derived from other sources -- especially from archeology -- and extra-linguistic factors have to be invoked as soon as we raise the question of explanation. Bantu-speaking communities did not expand by virtue of the fact that they spoke Bantu: this at least we may safely take for granted. Until a few years ago, the argument revolved around the names of two linguists -- about as different in temperament and training as any two linguists could be -- who had both by chance turned their attention to Bantu in the late 1940s. An American linguist, Joseph H. Greenberg, working towards a genetic classification for all African languages, arrived at a controversial conclusion regarding the relationship between Bantu and the so-called “Semi-Bantu” languages of Nigeria.