The Lemba are a traditionally endogamous group speaking a variety of Bantu languages who live in a number of locations in southern Africa. They claim descent from Jews who came to Africa from "Sena." "Sena" is variously identified by them as Sanaa in Yemen, Judea, Egypt, or Ethiopia. A previous study using Y-chromosome markers suggested both a Bantu and a Semitic contribution to the Lemba gene ...

Settling an Old Debate In their article “Bantu expansion shows that habitat alters the route and pace of human dispersals,” Grollemund et al. (1) have accomplished more than just their stated intention: to identify the role of habitat in channeling the directions of the early Bantu farming settlement of the African equatorial rainforest. What is most important is that the authors essentially br...

The expansion of Bantu languages, which started around 5,000 years before present in west/central Africa and spread all throughout sub-Saharan Africa, may represent one of the major and most rapid demographic movements in the history of the human species. Although the genetic footprints of this expansion have been unmasked through the analyses of the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA linea...

Southern Angola is a poorly studied region, inhabited by populations that have been associated with different migratory movements into southern Africa. Besides the long-standing presence of indigenous Kx’a-speaking foragers and the more recent arrival of Bantu-speaking pastoralists, ethnographic and linguistic studies have suggested that other pre-Bantu communities were also present in the Nami...

Technological and cultural innovations as well as climate changes are thought to have influenced the diffusion of major language phyla in sub-Saharan Africa. The most widespread and the richest in diversity is the Niger-Congo phylum, thought to have originated in West Africa ∼ 10,000 years ago (ya). The expansion of Bantu languages (a family within the Niger-Congo phylum) ∼ 5,000 ya represents ...

Tone in Bantu languages is rarely studied experimentally. This paper reports a production study which reveals the intricate interaction of tonal context and morphological structure in surface tone realization in Sepedi, a South African Bantu language.

Unlike most other modern Bantu languages, Kinande has faithfully preserved the Proto-Bantu contrast between [-ATR] and [+ATR] high vowels (Hyman, 2002). As a result, while other Bantu languages typically have only two contrastive high vowels (i.e. high back and high front), Kinande has four: [-ATR] [i u] and [+ATR] i u ]. 1 These four high vowels, together with mid [e o] and low [a], are laid o...

DOI: 10.5581/1516-8484.20130019 Sickle cell anemia (SCA) is defined as a monogenic disease that characterizes the homozygous state of hemoglobin S (Hb S). Hemoglobin S polymerizes under adverse conditions such as deoxygenation, acidosis or dehydration. Its polymers deform erythrocytes and lead to a diverse and complex pathophysiology(1,2). Beta-S globin haplotypes (βS haplotypes) are important ...

The expansion of Bantu-speaking agropastoralist populations had a great impact on the genetic, linguistic, and cultural variation of sub-Saharan Africa. It is generally accepted that Bantu languages originated in an area around the present border between Cameroon and Nigeria approximately 5,000 years ago, from where they spread South and East becoming the largest African linguistic branch. The ...

Since the early seventies, several classifications of Bantu languages have been proposed. Two branches have been identified in some of these classifications: Eastern and Western Bantu. The homogeneity of the languages of the Eastern branch has been confirmed, while the situation appears more complex with Western languages. Indeed, Bastin, Coupez and Mann (1999) have highlighted the complexity o...