Research on non-canonical syntactic constructions in Bantu languages in Africa has established some significant findings in the last decades, regarding the presence/absence of various types of inversion, agreement patterns, which grammatical/discourse element can be in the highest syntactic position, and which discourse element can trigger “subject” agreement. The present work attempts to build on these facts from the perspective of synchronic variation in the encoding of subject and prominent discourse elements, on the one hand, and a possible diachronic path of Bantu subjects, on the other. Data from 30 Bantu languages and a set of relevant morphosyntactic parameters are examined in order to arrive at a more comprehensive picture and a deeper understanding of the cross-Bantu variation in this empirical domain.