The Bantu peoples, or Bantu, are several hundred ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages,
spread over a vast area from Central Africa, to Southeast Africa, and to Southern Africa.
There are several hundred Bantu languages. Depending on the definition of "language" or
"dialect", it is estimated that there are between 440 and 680 distinct languages. The total
number of speakers is in the hundreds of millions, ranging at roughly 350 million in the
mid-2010s (roughly 30% of the population of Africa, or roughly 5% of the total world
population). About 60 million speakers (2015), divided into some 200 ethnic or tribal
groups, are found in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone.
The larger of the individual Bantu groups have populations of several million, e.g. the people
of Rwanda and Burundi (25 million), the Shona of Zimbabwe (15 million as of 2018), the Zulu of
South Africa (12 million as of 2005), the Luba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (7
million as of 2010), the Sukuma of Tanzania (9 million as of 2016), the Kikuyu of Kenya (8.1
million as of 2019), the Xhosa people of Southern Africa (8.1 million as of 2011), or the Pedi
of South Africa (5.7 million 2017).
“I think you travel to search and you come back home to find yourself there.”
“Action without thought is empty. Thought without action is blind.”
