“So, Where Did the Bantu Go?” A history of interdisciplinarity in African Studies, 1850-2025

For more than a century and a half, the concept of "Bantu" — coined by Wilhelm Bleek to designate a family of languages across sub-Saharan Africa — has become one of the most collectively sustained narratives in African Studies. Historical linguistics, archaeology, and population genetics have successively constructed, borrowed from, and reinforced one another around this concept, in an interdisciplinary dialogue that Jan Vansina described as early as 1978 as a "dialogue of the deaf." This project proposes an intellectual history of that circularity. The aim is not to settle the empirical question of Bantu origins, but to understand how disciplines have produced an illusion of convergence by sharing a common formal model — the genealogical tree — without ever examining its foundations. The project traces this trajectory in four stages: the philological origins of the concept, its appropriation by programmed archaeology, its extension into contemporary genomics, and its political uses, most notably in the construction of the South African Bantustans. Drawing on Jean-Paul Demoule's work on the Indo-European question, this history of interdisciplinarity contributes to a broader theory of epistemic circularity in the human and life sciences.