Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun A member of any of a large number of linguistically related peoples of central and southern Africa.
- noun A group of over 400 closely related languages spoken in central, east-central, and southern Africa, belonging to the eastern branch of the Benue-Congo group of the Niger-Congo language family and including Swahili, Kinyarwanda, Kirundi, Zulu, and Xhosa.
from The Century Dictionary.
- noun A name sometimes applied to the South African family of tongues.
from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.
- adjective Of or pertaining to the Bantu language group Bantu (definition 2).
- adjective of or pertaining to the Bantu people (definition 1).
- proper noun A member of one of the great family of Negroid tribes occupying equatorial and southern Africa. These tribes include, as important divisions, the Kafirs, Damaras, Bechuanas, and many tribes whose names begin with
Aba- ,Ama- ,Ba- ,Ma- ,Wa- , variants of the Bantu plural personal prefixAba- , as inBa-ntu , orAba-ntu , itself a combination of this prefix with the syllable-ntu , a person; or as inWatusi . - proper noun the family of languages spoken by the Bantu people (definition 1).
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- proper noun The largest African language family of the
Niger-Congo group, spoken in much ofSub-Saharan Africa. - proper noun General term for African ethnic groups speaking a Bantu language and their members.
- proper noun South Africa, dated A black South African.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a member of any of a large number of linguistically related peoples of Central and South Africa
- noun a family of languages widely spoken in the southern half of the African continent
- adjective of or relating to the African people who speak one of the Bantoid languages or to their culture
Etymologies
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
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Examples
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We knew there were White police officers, superintendents, pass office officials and others who daily insist on being spoken to in Afrikaans by any Bantu coming before them, regardless of the fact that the Bantu is able to speak this language or not; that there are even policemen who, rather than take a statement from a Bantu in English, chooses rather that the Bantu should give the statement to a Bantu interpreter in a Bantu language who will then interpret the statement to the White officer in Afrikaans, a strange thing which happens daily in Soweto police stations.
'I Saw a Nightmare …' Doing Violence to Memory: The Soweto Uprising, June 16, 1976 2005
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I still cant believe that Bantu is really dead … it so breaks my heart for Bantu was the rarest of species, a free spirit that roamed the world freely and he touched a number of hearts.
Global Voices in English » The News of Bantu Mwaura’s death shocks Kenyan bloggers 2009
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Their data have been important for learning about the health-related and "ritual" practices associated with pregnancy in Bantu-speaking communities, among others.
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It is that frontier people were not ordinarily creators of wholly new or reinvented societies in Bantu history.
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And we have recognized that in Bantu worldviews ancestry and spirituality were reservoirs of potential power. 49 But in Ruvu societies more specifically, the matrilineal line commanded the most influence and power.
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It is through this word's history that we access the conceptual reasoning behind the widespread understanding in Bantu societies that witchcraft could be actively placed on another body.
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As in Bantu history, we see that in the Muslim cultural sphere there was a schism between theory and applied medicine wherein most locally trained healers attached the deepest levels of affliction to ethereal forces.
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The derived noun is traceable well back in Bantu history as a word to name a hunting trap, but it seems that its medicinal meanings may have emerged in the proto-Kaskazi period of the later part of the last millennium BCE. 152 Among the Zaramo, for instance, it was a trap placed on farmed land.
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Eventually, however, the last arriving of those early Southern-Nyanza-Basin Bantu groups, those who are now referred to as proto-Northeast-Coastal-Bantu-speaking populations, came to predominate in the central-east Tanzania region.
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In the first place, the mwana nya nhiti ( "child of wood") incorporates an aspect of ancient Bantu ideas of wood as having medicinal properties, which in Bantu contexts did not preclude the power or "medicine" of ancestors.
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