<P> Individual Bantu groups today often comprise millions of people . Among these are the Ndebele and Shona of Zimbabwe with 14.2 million people; the Luba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with over 13.5 million people; the Zulu of South Africa, with over 10 million people; the Sukuma of Tanzania, with around eight million people; and the Kikuyu of Kenya, with over six million people . Although only around five million individuals speak the Arabic - influenced Swahili language as their mother tongue, it is used as a lingua franca by over 100 million people throughout Southeast Africa . Swahili also serves as one of the official languages of the African Union . </P> <P> The word Bantu, and its variations, means "people" or "humans". The root in Proto - Bantu is reconstructed as * - ntu . Versions of the word Bantu (that is, the root plus the class 2 noun class prefix * ba -) occur in all Bantu languages: for example, as watu in Swahili; bantu in Kikongo; anthu in Chichewa; batu in Lingala; bato in Kiluba; bato in Duala; abanto in Gusii; andũ in Kamba and Kikuyu; abantu in Kirundi, Kinyarwanda, Zulu, Xhosa, Runyakitara, and Ganda; wandru in Shingazidja; abantru in Mpondo and Ndebele; bãtfu in Phuthi; bantfu in Swati; banu in Lala; vanhu in Shona and Tsonga; batho in Sesotho, Tswana and Northern Sotho; antu in Meru; andu in Embu; vandu in some Luhya dialects; vhathu in Venda; and bhandu in Nyakyusa . </P> <P> 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 . </P> <P> Using a different comparative method focused more exclusively on relationships among Bantu languages, Guthrie argued for a single Central African dispersal point spreading at a roughly equal rate in all directions . Subsequent research on loanwords for adaptations in agriculture and animal husbandry and on the wider Niger--Congo language family rendered that thesis untenable . In the 1990s, Jan Vansina proposed a modification of Greenberg's ideas, in which dispersions from secondary and tertiary centers resembled Guthrie's central node idea, but from a number of regional centers rather than just one, creating linguistic clusters . </P>

In what area of africa did the early bantu originate