Who are the Bantou

The number of Bantu languages totals several hundred, with estimates ranging between 440 and 680 depending on the criteria used to define "language" or "dialect." The collective number of speakers reaches into the hundreds of millions, with around 350 million estimated in the mid-2010s, roughly constituting 30% of Africa's population and approximately 5% of the global population.

In the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone, there are approximately 60 million Bantu language speakers, distributed among roughly 200 ethnic or tribal groups.

Some of the larger Bantu groups boast populations in the millions, including the Rwandan, Tanzanian, Ugandan, Kenyan, and Burundian people (25 million collectively), the Baganda people of Uganda (5.5 million as of 2014), the Shona of Zimbabwe (17.6 million as of 2020), the Zulu of South Africa (14.2 million as of 2016), the Luba of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (28.8 million as of 2010), the Sukuma of Tanzania (10.2 million as of 2016), the Kikuyu of Kenya (8.1 million as of 2019), the Xhosa people of Southern Africa (9.6 million as of 2011), and the Pedi of South Africa (7 million as of 2018).