Is there evidence of Bantu origins of Black People in the West?

[Tropicana]

I stumbled across this on another forum when looking for information for the African Americans and Immigration topic. I thought it was interesting and my stimulate some interesting disucussion so here it is.

This map had struck my interest about a month ago. How on Earth can African Americans primarily be from West African populations (as the Western media so quickly alludes to) which are not lactose intolerant, but themselves be overwhelmingly lactose intolerant?

Now one thing that I have noticed for YEARS is that South African populations (Zulu, Xhosa, and Lesotho) have more browner skin tones IDENTICAL to the general brown skin of African Americans (which many have been fooled into believing is the result of white admixture from a previously much darker generation). Though I noticed this similarity it was one of those that you really up until now had no basis to link together or form a theory with.

Read more: http://egyptsearchreloaded.proboards...#ixzz33JVeq6sp

[Tropicana]

[Tropicana]

Compare all of that to this - evidence of West African Origin

It must be understood and acknowledged that the term "Afro American", has a much broader application than just the United States. It has to include all of the Americans which would also include Central America, South America and the Caribbean islands as well. In fact, more Africans wre taken to Mexico than to the USA during the period of slavery. The overwhelming majority went not to the US, but to the Caribbean and Latin America. Where did they come from? They came from many regions of Africa including the west coast, central Africa, Southern Africa and in some cases as far as Madagascar and East Africa. The overwhelming majority though came from West Africa and central Africa.

It must also be kept in mind, as Zarahan stated, that quite often slaves were dropped off in the Caribbean before being taken to the 13 colonies. England owned several islands in the West Indies such as Jamaica, Barbados and St Vincent to name a few. There was a lot of fluidity. The same slavers who serviced the Spanish colonies would also sell to the English, French and Dutch and of course North America.

There can be no doubt as to the West African origins of diasporan Africans living in the Americas because of the strong historical, linguistic nad cuktural evidence attesting to it. In many areas of Latin America and the Caribbean, people still have origin stories in their family as to where they came from. In my father's family for example, the story was passed down regarding how our male ancestor was kidnapped as a child from a kingdom boradering Congo and brought to Jamaica in the late 1700's. When I did my paternal DNA test it confirmed that our line originated in that area. There are others who still have the memory of relatives who came directly from Africa.
Trinidad: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QnNloVwwPE



Another strong group in a lot of our cultures are the Congos. They had a strong presence in Jamaica, Brazil and Cuba. While Cuba and Brazil are well known for the Yoruba based religions such as Luckumi, (Santeria) and Candomble, Umbanda etc, the Congo religions also have a wide following, one such example is the religion of Palo Mayumbe in Cuba as well as the fraternal organizations that exist in Cuba.

I'm not saying that there are no Southern African input in our ancestry, because there is. But the Central African and Western African input was much stronger, which is why they tend to dominate the aspects of African retentions in our languages, foods, religions, music styles and other form of culture.

Read more: http://egyptsearchreloaded.proboards...#ixzz33JWOnvE4

[Tropicana]

The reason why we can't exclude the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean from the United States is because we are and always have been intertwined. Ever since the Abolition of slavery in the Caribbean there has been immigration to the United States. Therefore, many people who identify as Afro Americans do infact have some West Indian ancestry. Consider the fact that Louisiana under the French had a strong ties with Haiti and that during the Haitian revolution thousands of people of African ancestry resettled in places like New Orleans. Consider the fact that before the American Revolution, slaves were shipped between the colonies in the Caribbean and the 13 colonies, so how are we not all related?

Consider that THE leading library for the study of African history and culture in the United States, if not the world, was founded by a Puerto Rican named Arturo Schaumberg. Just consider the contributions Jamaicans like Marcus Garvey made in the lives of the black community in the USA. How can one talk about an American Black pride movement without talking about Garvey, Schoumberg and the French speaking Negritude movement? You can't! Therefore, trying to separate "Afro Americans" in a sterile little box, as if they have no connections to their relatives in the diaspora is absurd. We always have and always will be intertwined, culturally, historically and genetically, so how are we not all related?

BUUUT, for those who persist in being obtuse...... Okay. I'll focus exclusively on THE UNITED STATES, after all, I do aim to please.....

But first, let's look at the issue of lactose intollerance in Africa. I'm not sure how we made the jump from south Africa all the way to the Nile Valley, but I'd just like to point out the fact East Africans are lactose tollerant. This is atested to by the fact that Egypt, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia and KEnya have a very old tradition of cattle pastorialism. If according to the theory of some people, the so called Bantus originated in Egypt and then migrated to other parts of Africa, why is it that Southern Africans are lactose intollerant? Considering how much pizza and ice cream is consumed in Afro American communities the claim that they are intollerant is a gross exaggeration.

Now lets address the issue of exactly where in Africa our Afro American ancestors came from. Let me first stae again that I'm not downplaying Southern Africa. Our ancestors came from a wide area which included parts of Southern Africa. What I'm saying is that the overwhelming majority of our ancestors came from Central and Western Africa. While the Caribbean and Latin America's African cultural links have been well documented, those of Afro Americans ahve been mostly ignored. However, if you know what to look for you can find many clues within aspects of Afro American culture.

FOLK CULTURE:
Afro American culture has a very rich tradition of story telling. One popular figure from the south is the trickster spider woman Aunt Nancy, who often uses the weaknesses of her much stronger adversaries against them to outsmart them. The origins of this character are to be found in the tales of the Ahanti peoples of Ghana where we find Anansi the spider god who often teaches mankind valuable lessons through trickery and using their ignorance and vices against them. Anansi is the Ahanti equivalent of Elegua, or Eshu amongst the Yoruba people of Nigeria. Anansi stories are found in Afro American communities from the Caribbean all the way to the American south where he became Aunt Nancy.

http://egyptsearchreloaded.proboards.com/thread/1635/african-americans-predominantly-bantu-descent

[Tropicana]

This is interesting.

LANGUAGE:

The debate over "Ebonics", or Black English is a still a very sensitive one and not dissimilar to the issue of language faced in the Caribbean. What they both share in common is the idea that these people speak broken or bad English. Closer examination however shows that what we actually have are dialects that were born out of the amalgamation of English and various African languages. Therefore, you may hav an English vocabulary, but an African gramatical structure. to get an idea of what early Afro American language was like, one can visit the Gullah people of the south who live on the Carolina islands. These people, unlike most Afro Americans, even during slavery, were largely independent from Whites and so they have managed to retain a lot of culture, including their language which is very close to the dialects spoken in the Caribbean

We also have strong evidence in the languages we speak. For example, there are still people in Jamaica who speak the Akan language. Such people are also found in Surinam. These two clips are a facinating documentation of one such person going to Ghana to trace his people and of a Ghanan traveling to Surinam and meeting these people. They have no problem speaking to each other.

Akan language in Surinam:

The popular language of Jamaica has very strong links to the languages of several West African ethnic groups:

"Examples from African languages include /se/ meaning that (in the sense of "he told me that..." = /im tel mi se/), taken from Ashanti Twi, and /dopi/ (duppy) meaning ghost, from the Twi word adope. The pronoun /unu/, used for the plural form of you, is taken from the Igbo language. Red eboe describes a fair-skinned black person because of the reported account of fair skin among the Igbo.[30] Soso meaning only comes from both Igbo and Yoruba.[31] From Igbo comes Obeah, a form of African shamanism (and also used as a popular scapegoat for common woes) originating from the Igbo dibia or obia ('doctoring') herbalists and spiritualists.[32]"

In addition to this, we see connections to the Akan in Jamaican folk culture. Every Jamaican has grown up hearing stories about Anansi the spider. Anansi is the spider deity of the Ashanti people. In the southern USA he is call Aunt Nancy.

Another strong linguistic connection is with the Yorubas. To this day, Yoruba is still used as a sacred language in Haiti, Cuba, Brazil and Trinidad. It is used in the songs and prayers.

Yoruba language in Cuba:

The West Africa linguistic connections are seen most strongly in the United States among the Gullah people of the south who live on the Carolina islands.

Gullah people USA:

[Tropicana]

FOOD:
From Creole dishes like Red Beans and rice rice to the Soul Food of the south the stamp of West Africa is evident and their relatives can be found in the Caribben, Ghana, Senegal, Gambia and of course Nigiria.

MUSIC:

Perhaps no other area of African influence is as visible as music. Afro Americans not only created vibrant forms of music, but have single handedly changed the sound of music around the world. Whether we're talking about Rock and Roll or Bollywood, the legagcy of African American music is there and it's roots are to be found in the traditions of West Africa. When we listen to music kile the Blues for instance, we cn find its roots inthe cultures of West Africa. Unlike the Caribbean, North Americans lost the tradition of the drum when it was surpressed by plantation owners out of fear. However, the tradition of string instruments flurished.

If you want to know the roots of the Blues, you need to examine the music of West Africa from the Gambia, the Niger River regions of Mali and Niger and into the Sahara as far north as Morocco. As you listen to the strains of these instruments, you can hear the way the guitar and base are played in the Mississippi Delta.

Gnawi Gumbri or Sintir music from Morocco. The Gnawa originated in the Bambara people of the Niger River

Read more: http://egyptsearchreloaded.proboards...#ixzz33JWxvLdm

[Tropicana]

Interesting.

Thoughts? Reactions?

[franksterr]

Interesting.

Thoughts? Reactions?

I read somewhere that all humans originated in Africa, if that be true......then we all Africans with varying degrees of melanin.

[franksterr]

I stumbled across this on another forum when looking for information for the African Americans and Immigration topic. I thought it was interesting and my stimulate some interesting disucussion so here it is.




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Read more: http://egyptsearchreloaded.proboards...#ixzz33JVeq6sp [/FONT][/COLOR]

This map had struck my interest about a month ago. How on Earth can African Americans primarily be from West African populations (as the Western media so quickly alludes to) which are not lactose intolerant, but themselves be overwhelmingly lactose intolerant?

I believe the reason for that maybe because the major western slave market was on the west coast of Africa....Ghana - first called the Gold Coast then later called the slave coast

Now one thing that I have noticed for YEARS is that South African populations (Zulu, Xhosa, and Lesotho) have more browner skin tones IDENTICAL to the general brown skin of African Americans (which many have been fooled into believing is the result of white admixture from a previously much darker generation). Though I noticed this similarity it was one of those that you really up until now had no basis to link together or form a theory with.

Diet may have more to do with complexion than sunlight.

[franksterr]

Compare all of that to this - evidence of West African Origin



Read more: http://egyptsearchreloaded.proboards...#ixzz33JWOnvE4

It must be understood and acknowledged that the term "Afro American", has a much broader application than just the United States. It has to include all of the Americans which would also include Central America, South America and the Caribbean islands as well. In fact, more Africans wre taken to Mexico than to the USA during the period of slavery. The overwhelming majority went not to the US, but to the Caribbean and Latin America. Where did they come from? They came from many regions of Africa including the west coast, central Africa, Southern Africa and in some cases as far as Madagascar and East Africa. The overwhelming majority though came from West Africa and central Africa.

It must also be kept in mind, as Zarahan stated, that quite often slaves were dropped off in the Caribbean before being taken to the 13 colonies. England owned several islands in the West Indies such as Jamaica, Barbados and St Vincent to name a few. There was a lot of fluidity. The same slavers who serviced the Spanish colonies would also sell to the English, French and Dutch and of course North America.

There can be no doubt as to the West African origins of diasporan Africans living in the Americas because of the strong historical, linguistic nad cuktural evidence attesting to it. In many areas of Latin America and the Caribbean, people still have origin stories in their family as to where they came from. In my father's family for example, the story was passed down regarding how our male ancestor was kidnapped as a child from a kingdom boradering Congo and brought to Jamaica in the late 1700's. When I did my paternal DNA test it confirmed that our line originated in that area. There are others who still have the memory of relatives who came directly from Africa.
Trinidad: www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QnNloVwwPE



Another strong group in a lot of our cultures are the Congos. They had a strong presence in Jamaica, Brazil and Cuba. While Cuba and Brazil are well known for the Yoruba based religions such as Luckumi, (Santeria) and Candomble, Umbanda etc, the Congo religions also have a wide following, one such example is the religion of Palo Mayumbe in Cuba as well as the fraternal organizations that exist in Cuba.

I'm not saying that there are no Southern African input in our ancestry, because there is. But the Central African and Western African input was much stronger, which is why they tend to dominate the aspects of African retentions in our languages, foods, religions, music styles and other form of culture.

What has been left out is the Africans who were in the Americas before the advent of the European.

[jah_yout]

Interesting.

Thoughts? Reactions?

i oppose the term "BANTU" as tricknology

[Tropicana]

i oppose the term "BANTU" as tricknology

Geez!!

[Tropicana]

Bantu peoples is used as a general label for the 300–600 ethnic groups in Africa who speak Bantu languages.

[jah_yout]

Bantu peoples is used as a general label for the 300–600 ethnic groups in Africa who speak Bantu languages.

so how can there be a "bantu origin of black people"....

did the bantu come first or did the black come first?

[Tropicana]

Bantu origins of Black People in the West?

Some are questioning the prevailing notion that the majority of our ancestors are from West Africa. I saw this discussed on another board. They had a great discussion about it and thought it would be interesting to discuss here.

If this topic is of no interest to you, feel free to by-pass it.