Bantu peoples of South Africa

South African Bantu-speaking peoples represent the overwhelming majority ethno-racial group of South Africans. Occasionally grouped as Bantu, the term itself is derived from the English word "people", common to many of the Bantu languages. The Oxford Dictionary of South African English describes "Bantu", when used in a contemporary usage and or racial context as "obsolescent and offensive", because of its strong association with the "white minority rule" with their apartheid system, however, Bantu is used without pejorative connotations in other parts of Africa and is still used in South Africa as the group term for the language family. The history of the Bantu-speaking peoples from South Africa has in the past been misunderstood due to the deliberate spreading of false narratives such as The Empty Land Myth. First published by W.A. Holden in the 1860s, this doctrine claims that South Africa had mostly been an unsettled region and that Bantu-speaking peoples had begun to migrate southwards from present day Zimbabwe at the same time as the Europeans had begun to move northwards from the Cape settlement, despite there being no historical or archaeological evidence to support this theory. This theory originated in Southern Africa during the period of Colonisation of Africa, historians have noted that this theory had already gained currency among Europeans by the mid-1840s. Its later alternative form of note were conformed around the "1830s concept of Mfecane", trying to hide and ignore the intrusion of Europeans on Bantu lands, by implying that the territory they colonized was devoid of human habitation (as a result of the Mfecane). Modern research has disputed this historiographical narrative. By the 1860s, when Holden was propagating his theory, this turbulent period had resulted in large swathes of South African land falling under the control of either the Boer Republics or British colonials, there was denaturalization accompanied with forced displacement and population transfer of these indigenous peoples from their land, the myth being used as the justification for the capture and settlement of Bantu-speaking peoples's land.