Current scholarly understanding places the ancestral proto - Bantu homeland in West Africa near the present - day southwestern border of Nigeria and Cameroon c. 4,000 years ago (2000 B.C.), and regards the Bantu languages as a branch of the Niger -- Congo language family. This view represents a resolution of debates in the 1960s over competing theories advanced by Joseph Greenberg and Malcolm Guthrie, in favor of refinements of Greenberg 's theory. Based on wide comparisons including non-Bantu languages, Greenberg argued that Proto - Bantu, the hypothetical ancestor of the Bantu languages, had strong ancestral affinities with a group of languages spoken in Southeastern Nigeria. He proposed that Bantu languages had spread east and south from there, to secondary centers of further dispersion, over hundreds of years.
in what area of africa did the early bantu originate
West Africa near the present - day southwestern border of Nigeria and Cameroon