Negroid (less commonly called Congoid) is an obsolete racial grouping of various people indigenous to Africa south of the area which stretched from the southern Sahara desert in the west to the African Great Lakes in the southeast, but also to isolated parts of South and Southeast Asia (Negritos). The term is derived from now-disproven conceptions of race as a biological category.
The concept of dividing humankind into three races called Caucasoid, Mongoloid, and Negroid (originally named "Ethiopian") was introduced in the 1780s by members of the Göttingen School of History and further developed by Western scholars in the context of "racist ideologies" during the age of colonialism.
With the rise of modern genetics, the concept of distinct human races in a biological sense has become obsolete. In 2019, the American Association of Biological Anthropologists stated: "Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation. It was never accurate in the past, and it remains inaccurate when referencing contemporary human populations."
Negroid has Portuguese or Spanish and Ancient Greek etymological roots. It literally translates as "black resemblance" from the Portuguese and Spanish word negro (black) from Latin nigrum, and Greek οειδές -oeidēs, equivalent to -o- + είδες -eidēs "having the appearance of", derivative of είδος eîdos "appearance". The earliest recorded use of the term "Negroid" came in 1859.
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a scholar at the then modern Göttingen University developed a concept dividing mankind into five races in the revised 1795 edition of his De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Variety of Mankind). Although Blumenbach's concept later gave rise to scientific racism, his arguments were basically anti-racist, since he underlined that mankind as a whole forms one single species, and points out that the transition from one race to another is so gradual that the distinctions between the races presented by him are "very arbitrary".
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In the English language, negro, or negress for females, is a term historically used to denote persons considered to be of Black African heritage. The word negro means the color black in both Spanish and in Portuguese (from Latin niger), where English took it from. The term can be construed as offensive, inoffensive, or completely neutral, largely depending on the region or country where it is used, as well as the context in which it is applied. It has various equivalents in other languages of Europe.
Hamites is the name formerly used for some Northern and Horn of Africa peoples in the context of a now-outdated model of dividing humanity into different races which was developed originally by Europeans in support of colonialism and slavery. The term was originally borrowed from the Book of Genesis, where it is used for the descendants of Ham, son of Noah. The term was originally used in contrast to the other two proposed divisions of mankind based on the story of Noah: Semites and Japhetites.
The Bantu peoples are an ethnolinguistic grouping of approximately 400 distinct native African ethnic groups who speak Bantu languages. The languages are native to 24 countries spread over a vast area from Central Africa to Southeast Africa and into Southern Africa. There are several hundred Bantu languages. Depending on the definition of "language" or "dialect", it is estimated that there are between 440 and 680 distinct languages.