I doubt the term Bantu comes from the classical arabic term "Aba".
The term Bantu is only the plural form of the word Muntu, which means
in Kiswahili and Kikongo: Homo, that is the human being, or to use a
sexist term (which I am not at all): Man as opposed to animal. Muntu
is the Human and Bantu are Humans.
The root of this word is a distinctive characteristic of many Bantu
languages, since you see it in many of them. For instance, in
Lingala (a language spoken in Congo and Zaire), it is Moto; in
Kinyarwanda and Kirundi (respectively in Rwanda and Burundi), it is
Umuntu; in Beti languages (a group of languages spoken in South
Central Cameroon), it is Mot. Just to name a few. All these
expressions mean the Human Being.
And the term Muntu (the singular form of Bantu) does not come from
your classical arabic term Aba. You cannot have the plural form of
the word to come from one language and its original form (the
singular) to come from another. That's inconsistency. It may also be
important to point out that many of those languages I mention here
(especially those of the Central African region) don't have anything
to do with Arabic. The people who speak them may not historically
have received any influence from the Arabs.The kiswahili instance is
a different story. I am not speaking about the contemporary sites of
interaction between these people and the Arabs.
By the way does not the term Aba sound like the semitic term Abba, which
means Father ? I am not sure about this. But I am just trying to emphasize
the difference of meanings of these terms Aba and Bantu.
Moreover, what do you call Niger-Congo: tribe or language ? Your
combination of these two entities (niger and congo) is not convincing
to me. There exists a Kongo ethnic group (some would call it tribe)
located in south-western Zaire, northern Angola and southern
Congo-Brazzaville. This constitutes an ethnic and linguistic entity
which belongs to the wider Bantu linguistic group.
[2]
Date sent: Fri, 2 Jun 1995
From: Samuel Kasule, University of Derby
<S.Kasule@derby.ac.uk>
The root of abantu is '-ntu' not Ba-. Therefore you can have: omuntu
or abantu or bantu. Simply translated in one African language:
omuntu = is a single person or a human being [read man]
abantu = many people; a group of people; a community; people; men
bantu = human beings; civilised people [not in the European sense
though]
bantu = people whose languages and mutually intelligible