The Somali Bantus are descendants of enslaved peoples from various Bantu ethnic groups from Southeast Africa, particularly from Mozambique, Malawi, and Tanzania.

[13][14] The number of Somali Bantu in Somalia is estimated to be around 900,000 persons and is mainly concentrated in the south, but they can be found in urban areas throughout the country.

[1] Although ref world minority rights website cites a figure of 1 million Somali Bantus in Somalia who made up 15% of the population in an article published in 2011 and taken from the UN's Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN) in 2010.

However, the term "Somali Bantu" in specific is an ethnonym that was created by humanitarian agencies shortly after the outbreak of the civil war in Somalia in 1991.

The neologism further spread through the media, which repeated verbatim what the aid agencies' increasingly began indicating in their reports as a new name for Somalia's ethnically Bantu minorities.

[23][24] However, no reliable historical documentation exists directly linking the present-day Somali Bantu to the premodern civilizations of Somalia.

To meet the demand for menial labor, black Africans from southeastern Africa bought by Somali, Omanis, Benadiri & Swahili slave traders & were sold in cumulatively large numbers over the centuries to customers in Morocco, Libya, Somalia, Egypt, Arabia, the Persian Gulf, India, the Far East and the Indian Ocean islands.

[6] Bantu slaves were made to work in plantations owned by Somalis along the Shebelle and Jubba rivers, harvesting lucrative cash crops such as grain and cotton.

Some Bantu groups, however, remained enslaved until the 1910s in the areas not totally dominated by the Italians, and continued to be despised and discriminated against by large parts of Somali society.

[18] To escape war and famine, tens of thousands of Bantus fled to refugee camps like Dadaab in neighboring Kenya, with most vowing never to return to Somalia.

[9] In 2002, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) moved a large number of Bantu refugees 1500 km to Kakuma in northwest Kenya because it was safer to process them for resettlement farther away from the Somali border.

[46] The documentary film Rain in a Dry Land chronicles this journey, with stories of Bantu refugees resettled in Springfield, Massachusetts and Atlanta, Georgia.

[47] Plans to resettle the Bantu in smaller towns, such as Holyoke, Massachusetts and Cayce, South Carolina, were scrapped after local protests.

There are also communities of several hundred to a thousand Bantu people in cities that also have high concentrations of ethnic Somalis such as the Minneapolis-St. Paul area,[48] Columbus, Ohio,[49] Atlanta,[50] San Diego,[51] Boston,[52] Pittsburgh,[53] and Seattle,[54] with a notable presence of about 1,000 Bantus in Lewiston, Maine.

[55] Making Refuge follows Somali Bantus' strenuous journey towards eventual resettlement in Lewiston and details several families' stories of relocating there.

In 2002, former Mayor Laurier Raymond wrote an open letter to Somali Bantu residents in an effort to dissuade them from further relocation to Lewiston.

The Tanzanian authorities also experienced additional pressure when refugees from neighbouring Rwanda began pushing into the western part of the country, forcing them to retract their offer to accommodate the Bantus.

[18][45] On the other hand, the Bantus who spoke kizigula had already started arriving in Tanzania since before the war due to discrimination experienced in Somalia.

[1][18][61] In 2024, Somalia joined the East African Community, a trade bloc with many member states where the Somali Bantu have ancestral ties to and has the objective of establishing freedom of movement.