Which of the following pairs is not correctly matched? (a) Fulani - West Africa (b) Bantu - Sahara (c) Massai - East Africa (d) Nuba - Sudan

Which of the following pairs is not correctly matched? (a) Fulani - West Africa (b) Bantu - Sahara (c) Massai - East Africa (d) Nuba - Sudan Correct Answer b

The correct answer is Option 2.

Key Points

• Bantu
  • Bantu peoples are the speakers of Bantu languages, comprising several hundred indigenous ethnic groups in Africa, spread over a vast area from Central Africa across the African Great Lakes to Southern Africa.
  • The total number of languages ranges in the hundreds, depending on the definition of "language" or "dialect", estimated at between 440 and 680 distinct languages.
  • The total number of speakers is in the hundreds of millions, ranging at roughly 350 million in the mid-2010s (roughly 30% of the population of Africa, or roughly 5% of the total world population).
  • About 60 million speakers (2015), divided into some 200 ethnic or tribal groups, are found in the Democratic Republic of Congo alone.

Additional Information

• Fulani
  • The Fulani are one of the largest ethnic groups in the Sahel and West Africa, widely dispersed across the region.
  • Inhabiting many countries, they live mainly in West Africa and northern parts of Central Africa but also in South Sudan, Darfur, Eritrea, and regions near the Red Sea coast.
  • A significant proportion of the Fula – a third, or an estimated 12 to 13 million– are pastoralists, and their ethnic group has the largest nomadic pastoral community in the world.
  • The majority of the Fula ethnic group consisted of semi-sedentary people as well as sedentary settled farmers, scholars, artisans, merchants, and nobility.
  • As an ethnic group, they are bound together by the Fula language, their history, and their culture.
• Massai
  • The Maasai are a Nilotic ethnic group inhabiting northern, central, and southern Kenya and northern Tanzania.
  • They are among the best-known local populations internationally due to their residence near the many game parks of the African Great Lakes, and their distinctive customs and dress.
  • The Maasai speak the Maa language, a member of the Nilotic language family that is related to the Dinka, Kalenjin, and Nuer languages.
  • Except for some elders living in rural areas, most Maasai people speak the official languages of Kenya and Tanzania, Swahili and English.
• Nuba
  • The Nuba people are various indigenous ethnic groups who inhabit the Nuba Mountains of South Kordofan state in Sudan, encompassing multiple distinct people that speak different languages which belong to at least two unrelated language families.
  • Estimates of the Nuba population vary widely; the Sudanese government estimated that they numbered 1.07 million in 2003.
  • The term should not be confused with the Nubians, an ethnic group speaking the Nubian languages, although the Hill Nubians, who live in the Nuba Mountains, are also considered part of the Nuba geographic grouping of peoples.