From Nigeria to Zulu: A journey of blood and language for the Bantu people
Lagos, Nigeria: Prepared by Dr. Alia Amer
A demographer specializing in gender studies
Representative of North African countries to the African Union for Population Studies
The Negroid races on the western side of the continent are characterized by a great diversity of languages, exceeding 500 at the very least. The Bantu, on the other hand, have one language family. This does not mean that a speaker in the southern part of the continent can understand what someone from the eastern or western side is saying. Rather, it means that the languages spoken by people in all the Bantu homelands are very similar, just as the languages of the French, Spanish, Italians, and others are similar, as they are branches of the Latin language.
In addition to this, we note that the Bantu homelands are adjacent and contiguous in an area equivalent to one-third of the African continent, and their spread is marred only by the presence of a small number of lineages such as the Bushmen and the Hottentots, which do not occupy a country, but rather live alongside the dominant lineages of the Bantu. 
The Bantu homelands, the original and only home of the Grassfields region in Cameroon and southeastern Nigeria, then extend eastward with many meanders to the north from the south.
The phenomenon of the expansion of the Bantu homelands, and their proximity in such a way that they form a huge mass of people of Negroid races with similar languages, is a phenomenon that lacks interpretation and explanation, and scholars have researched it and their opinions have diverged in interpreting it.
The existence of a language family spread across distant homelands, such as the Bantu languages, suggests the possibility that there was one country from which the language gradually spread in successive waves until it covered the entire area. Therefore, researchers focused their thinking on identifying this original homeland from which those languages spread.
The first opinion, which prevailed for a long time, was that its original homeland was East Africa in the Nile Lakes region, or to the east of it.
It is highly probable that those who hold this view were influenced by several phenomena observed among the Bantu people. Many of them possess certain well-known Caucasian characteristics, such as a moderate proportion of the nose and lips, and even skin color, particularly among the aristocratic classes. Thus, the individual Bantu carries some Caucasian blood within their constitution. Speakers of Bantu languages have settled in various lands, and in these new lands, the languages have evolved and undergone some modifications, as always occurs when a language spreads widely. Those who hold this view argue that the languages spoken by certain isolated groups in the equatorial lakes region exhibit these characteristics due to their isolation and lack of contact.
In their view, this is evidence that the first Bantu language was in the Lakes region, and from it came the primitive form, which indicates that it did not develop and spread to other regions.
