Abstract:
Narratives about the history of Central Africa before the colonial period are dominated by what is conventionally called the “Bantu expansion”. However, historians, archaeologists and linguists (the three academic disciplines most involved in the task of reconstructing the remote African past) seem engaged in an endless debate about the nature, duration, scope and internal development of this process -- some authors even doubting that anything that can be named as such has, in fact, happened. Some of the divergences concern the meaning of a given evidence (archaeological, linguistic or historical); others refer to the production of the evidence itself; and still others relate to the broader conceptual frameworks that support conflicting interpretations.
