Bantè

Bantè is a town, arrondissement, and commune in western Benin. It is located in the former Zou Province of which since 1999 is part of the Collines Department. The commune covers an area of 2695 square kilometres and as of 2013 had a population of 106,945 people. The majority of the population is ethnically Nagot, who themselves are descendants of the Yoruba. Famous for the art exhibition Nago Hunters of the Bante Kingdom by Jean-Dominique Burton.

The town is connected by the RNIE 3 highway.

Towns and villages

Settlements in the commune of Bantè include:

Arrondissements

The nine Arrondissements in the commune of Bantè are:

References

External links

Bant

Bant is one of the so-called green villages (Dutch: groendorpen) in the Dutch province of Flevoland. It is a part of the municipality of Noordoostpolder, and lies about 7 km north of Emmeloord.

Name

The name Bant is derived from the estates of Bant or Bantega, which at one point existed in what is now the municipality of Lemsterland, and extended into the area that is now the Noordoostpolder.

History

Prison camp

After World War II, before the founding of Bant, the site was used as a prisoner camp for Nazi-collaborators under the name Kamp Westvaart. The camp was accommodated with watchtowers and armed guards. Several prominent collaborators served sentences in the camp. Jan Gunnink, former head of the KP-Meppel, a prominent resistance movement during the war, served as camp commander.

The camp was subject of a social experiment, in which prisoners were offered a contract in which they declared they would not resist and fight in exchange for free movement within the camp. Every prisoner signed the contract. The experiment was later cancelled, but because every prisoner kept to their promises, they were set free. Remaining sentences were instead served out as regular labourer.

Bantu peoples

Bantu peoples is used as a general label for the 300–600 ethnic groups in Africa who speak Bantu languages. They inhabit a geographical area stretching east and southward from Central Africa across the African Great Lakes region down to Southern Africa. Bantu is a major branch of the Niger-Congo language family spoken by most populations in Africa. There are about 650 Bantu languages by the criterion of mutual intelligibility, though the distinction between language and dialect is often unclear, and Ethnologue counts 535 languages.

About 3000 years ago, speakers of the proto-Bantu language group began a millennia-long series of migrations eastward from their homeland between West Africa and Central Africa at the border of eastern Nigeria and Cameroon. This Bantu expansion first introduced Bantu peoples to central, southern, and southeastern Africa, regions they had previously been absent from. The proto-Bantu migrants in the process assimilated and/or displaced a number of earlier inhabitants that they came across, including Khoisan populations in the south and Afro-Asiatic groups in the southeast.