Oct 22, 2026 · 42 min · 10 segments
Aubrey Masango speaks to cultural expert Professor Musa Xulu about understanding the term “Bantu”, its historical and linguistic context, the origins and migration of Bantu-speaking peoples, and how…
Musa XuluGuest
Aubrey MasangoHost
And I love the comparison of Ubuntu in this sense to the categorization of Anglo-Saxon, for example.
And Abantu or the Bantu are also, at least according to what I'm understanding you to be saying, are a linguistic category that has certain commonalities.
That's because these people once lived together thousands of years ago, let me say maybe three, four, five thousand years ago, and started the migration mainly from the Great Lakes in Central Africa.
And towards the south, towards the east, which goes as far as Kenya and to the south in Tanzania and then Mozambique, southeast.
The anthropologists and linguists who group these languages, you don't create it from your own mind set when you do.
It's a scientific way of doing linguistic categorization, which can be quantified when you will study it.
So it's unrelated completely to colonialism, which only came some 400 or 500 years ago here.
Cultural practices are things like, how do people get married? What processes are followed to confirm that people are married? And you'll find that linguistic group will have similar types of cultural practices.
And I love the comparison of Ubuntu in this sense to the categorization of Anglo-Saxon, for example.
And Abantu or the Bantu are also, at least according to what I'm understanding you to be saying, are a linguistic category that has certain commonalities.
That's because these people once lived together thousands of years ago, let me say maybe three, four, five thousand years ago, and started the migration mainly from the Great Lakes in Central Africa.
And towards the south, towards the east, which goes as far as Kenya and to the south in Tanzania and then Mozambique, southeast.
The anthropologists and linguists who group these languages, you don't create it from your own mind set when you do.
It's a scientific way of doing linguistic categorization, which can be quantified when you will study it.
So it's unrelated completely to colonialism, which only came some 400 or 500 years ago here.
Cultural practices are things like, how do people get married? What processes are followed to confirm that people are married? And you'll find that linguistic group will have similar types of cultural practices.
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