The lifeworld of the Kwilu-Kasai region’s first Bantu speakers : insights from lexical reconstruction

Abstract:The Kwilu-Kasai region, more specifically the zone between the Kasai and Kamtsha Rivers, is the putative homeland of the West-Coastal branch of the Bantu family. The speakers of the most recent common ancestor language of West-Coastal Bantu were presumably the first Bantu speakers to settle in the Kwilu-Kasai region. In this chapter, we examine which ancestral lexicon can be reconstructed in Proto-West-Coastal Bantu based on shared vocabulary which modern West-Coastal Bantu languages retained. We assess what this circumstantial lexical evidence tells us about the lifeworld of the first Bantu speakers of the Kwilu-Kasai region, and how it had evolved since the start of the Bantu Expansion across the Congo rainforest. We specifically focus on vocabulary for pottery, metallurgy, flora, and fauna, as these lexical domains correspond most closely to potential archaeological find categories. It allows us to evaluate to what extent direct archaeological and indirect historical linguistic evidence match or not and where lexical reconstruction can possibly supplement gaps in the archaeological record. We conclude that the first Bantu-speaking settlers in the Kwilu-Kasai region were proficient potters and iron metallurgists and that their mixed subsistence economy can be characterised as low-level food production with domesticates in which food procurement through collecting and hunting continued to play a crucial role. Their natural ecology was predominantly (sub)tropical moist lowland forest, which differs from the current tropical savanna habitat featuring savanna grasslands with clumps of forest in the lowlands.

ISBN:9781032658148

Publication year:2025

Accessibility:Open