COLUMBIA -- About 120 members of an African tribe soon will settle in Columbia.

The first wave of Somali Bantu likely will arrive sometime this summer, said the Rev. Richard Robinson, coordinator of the Lutheran Family Services Refugee Resettlement Program.

The Somalis will need assistance making the transition into American culture and democracy. Robinson said he thinks Midlands residents will want to help the new transplants when they their story.

"When we heard about the plight of the Somali Bantu, we felt very passionate about bringing them here," said Robinson, an ordained Baptist minister. "The fact that they had no place to go ... the intense suffering they have gone through. Those things really resonated with my minister's heart, my human heart."

The Somali Bantu are a rural, agricultural people used to hard labor and little reward, who have been denied education, said Andrew Billingsley, a sociology and African-American studies professor at the University of South Carolina.

In the 1800s, the Bantu's ancestors were taken by Arab slave traders from the East Africa region that is now home to the nations of Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi. They were sold on the Zanzibar slave market and dispersed throughout the Middle East and Africa.

Those who ended up in Somalia became known as the Somali Bantu, where they were persecuted as slaves and as free men and women.

Even after slavery was outlawed in 1930, their situation barely improved. They occupied the lowest rungs of society, received little formal education and performed the most menial jobs.

The 1990 Somali civil war worsened their plight. Many had become farmers in the Juba River Valley on the Kenya-Somalia border, far from Somalia's capital of Mogadishu. But as fighting and famine swept through the land, their farms were plundered.

The majority fled to Kenya where they remained for a decade while the United Nations High Commission on Refugees searched for a home for the Bantu.

Between 8,000 and 12,000 Somali Bantu have been approved by the U.S. State Department to resettle in about 50 U.S. cities, including Columbia.

The Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service and the Church World Service refugee program, two of nine voluntary resettlement organizations in the United States, are partnering with Lutheran Family Services in South Carolina to bring the Somali Bantu to Columbia.

Robinson's organization proposed Columbia for one of the resettlement locations because housing is inexpensive and entry-level jobs are relatively plentiful.

They plan to settle the Somali Bantu in one apartment complex in the Columbia area. They are seeking 20 to 30 congregations to take on a six-month commitment to sponsor individual families.

The agency also needs doctors willing to provide free or low-cost medical care, translators, tutors and employers willing to hire the Somali Bantu.

Robinson says he's faced some difficult questions about the refugees. Critics of U.S. immigration policies point to Lewiston, Maine, where the population of ethnic Somalis swelled to nearly 2,000 in less than two years. The city's welfare and education resources were strained dramatically.

The Somali Bantu were approved for resettlement before the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. After the Bush administration launched the war on terrorism their application -- as well as those of other refugees seeking entrance to the U.S. -- was slowed. Those accepted into the resettlement program must pass political, psychological and health requirements set by the U.S. State Department.

Robinson says introducing immigrants and refugees to democracy and freedom remains one of America's great distinctions. "Our strength has been our diversity," he says. "We are who we are because we welcome people."