  Computing and Internet access are substantially growing markets in Southern
Africa, which brings with it increasing demands for local content and tools in
indigenous African languages. Since most of those languages are low-resourced,
efforts have gone into the notion of bootstrapping tools for one African
language from another. This paper provides an overview of these efforts for
Niger-Congo B (`Bantu') languages. Bootstrapping grammars for geographically
distant languages has been shown to still have positive outcomes for morphology
and rules or grammar-based natural language generation. Bootstrapping with
data-driven approaches to NLP tasks is difficult to use meaningfully regardless
geographic proximity, which is largely due to lexical diversity due to both
orthography and vocabulary. Cladistic approaches in comparative linguistics may
inform bootstrapping strategies and similarity measures might serve as proxy
for bootstrapping potential as well, with both fertile ground for further
research.
