Is there any difference between the appearance of west, middle and East Africans?

Question

Due to the Bantu tribe expansion over the centuries.
I want to know about my heritage.

Answer 1

There is a lot of physical difference between tribes.There are intricate differences you will only be able to recognise once you live amongst these people.The tribes vary a lot withing countries,and Nigeria alone has some 350 tribes some of them are Bantu origin.Example: The Ibo are of Bantu origin,so is their language Ibo.Their skin colour is slightly more towards yellow and they have rounded faces.Yorubas on the other hand are dark with open round faces.
Within their tribe there are differences as well.It is in fact a potpourri of tribes you are talking about and millions of people.
If you are an African American your heritage could be Ghanaian or Nigerian or Liberia and other westernafrican countries,the source of Afro-Americans.Bantus have indeed expanded to the North,East and West from their heartland the Congo.

Answer 2

Africa is the most diverse human gene pool in the world, so it's very hard to pin down what someone from any given part of Africa is going to look like. And it's not just the Bantus that have expanded over the centuries. Over time, Africa has been conquered, reconquered, vacated, repopulated . . . people have been moving and mixing for thousands and thousands of years, and there's been so many empires.

I'm sorry to say that exploring your heritage by trying to figure out who you look like probably isn't going to work. It sucks. Alternate routes you might take are few, depending on where you live and how long your ancestors have been away from Africa. Are you an American? If you're an American, trying to figure out your African ancestry is really like searching for a needle in a haystick, unless your ancestors were more recent immigrants. Africans in the US have been relatively homogenized for a very long time - I mean to say, in the US, black has been black for quite a while, and no one's really kept track of different lineages. That is, of course, a product of racism - why did white people get to keep track of their lineages, but not black people? Well, it's pretty obvious.

Something you might be able to try is to find bits of folklore among your family - bedtime stories, songs, things like that - and to see if there are any equivalents in the folklore of African groups. That's still a longshot, though. Just as people have been mixing up their genes, they've also been mixing up their traditions.

As a last resort, remember, pedigrees are for dogs and rich people. Just get down with whatever traditions your own family has, and work with what you've got. All I've got is a bunch of stories from my grandparents that turned out to be less than factual. But the various tall tales I have about my ancestry - even if they're not historical facts - are really much more interesting than a list of who was born where and when and who came from where.

Answer 3

I have seen both Bantu and Somalians and personally can not tell the difference. In terms of Africa as a continent; North Africans=arab looking. East=I think there are eyes are slightly farther apart and there nose is slightly thinner than the West but I don't know. Ghanans have more wide noses and Senegalis have wider forheads. These are just my observations; I'm not saying they are beautiful or ugly traits. Peace.

Answer 4

mirah with all due admire i could answer ur question regardless of if it can be a waste because of the fact ur friends are gonna report me lower back. EDIT: unquestionably ur hyperlinks are meaningless besides. ur in simple terms using few examples to objective to teach ur concept that africans are the main different and that they are "finished blooded". bunch of photographs arent gonna decrease it. and that i will see some ppl are already initiating to apply their thumbs up/down at right here and as normally happening i've got been given the main thumbs down. maximum east africans and various west africans have been concurred and mixed with arabs so of direction it extremely is going to be no longer subject-free to tell in particular situations. why dont u ever teach any satisfaction in different african international places? why in simple terms the mixed societies? EDIT: ok ur precise im going to admire u because of the fact it extremely is ur post. yet i nevertheless think of u could desire to examine some heritage. i grew to become into very surprised on the shortcoming of ideas u had approximately that subject rely. nontheless i will tell which of them are mixed because of the fact idk which of them precisely are east or west african. yet i guess those with caucasian constructive factors are west african and those with black constructive factors are east african. if that's what ur attempting to teach us.

Answer 5

Yes i saw it on Dateline, um East Africians are better sprinters they are a little shorter and wider in the legs, While West Africans are better long distances runners, they tend to have longer leg bones more suited for distances. May have the sides mixed up but there is a difference in body structure.

Answer 6

Yes, I think there are some differences in terms of appearance, however regretfully, I don't know the details. Sorry.

Answer 7

Yes, there are many different ethnic groups, especially in a continent as large and diverse as all of Africa!

These people are all Africans:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mandela_minus_Clinton.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Iman1.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Soyinka.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Muammar_al-Gaddafi.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mobutu.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:42-17227523.jpg

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2004/index.html