I don't like giving a boring answer, but my suspicion is that the most likely alternative is that another neighboring people in West Africa, such as one of the other Southern Bantoid groups, takes the same technological advantages and follows mostly the same expansion route.
Well, Cushitic peoples IOTL made it as far south as Tanzania IOTL:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Cushitic_languages
So, East Africa would most likely be Cushitic-speaking ITTL.
 
I see your point, but I mean I think it's most likely that another ATL Bantoid group would displace/assimilate most of the Cushitic peoples in their path, perhaps leaving some local linguistic islands like the South Cushitic languages are OTL.
The Bantu were just the eastern edge of Niger-Congo culture. IE they had a bunch of other people with the same technology to their west. They expanded because they -were- the edge, and there was a power vacuum to their right. It's less a vokswanderung and more a (slightly faster) replication of the advance of Middle Eastern farmers into paleolithic Europe- each generation putting down a new farm a few miles further because the natives can't stop them, with added military friction at the frontier.

The reason they wouldn't migrate would be lack of the power vacuum. This means adding agriculture (in some cases just -more- agriculture) for the pastoral Cushtics, Nilotes and Khoi in East Africa, or less probably, agriculture for the pygmies. And perhaps leaking iron working from ancient Ethiopia before the Bantu arrive.

This may result in a Bantu lowland, native highland situation in some malaria and TseTse prone regions, as their cultural toolkit (and initial disease resistance) is more lowland adapted, whereas the Ethiopian toolkit is highland.
 
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So, what would a Malagasy-populated South Africa look like?

I would assume that it would be rather similar to Madagascar, being an agrarian society with rice as an important food source. It could also be possible that if the Malagasy on the coast of Mozambique maintain contact with Madagascar, they might come into contact with the various peoples that traded with Madagascar in OTL. This could result in Hindu influences in the region from gujarati merchants or even Islamic influence from arab and somali traders (if the religion still exists)

I would also like to point out that in OTL the bantus did reach Madagascar and contributed significantly to the genetic make up of the population. Therefore, without the bantu migration, the Malagasy would not have as much sub-Saharan genetic input as they do today.
 
Hasn’t it been argued that even somewhat delaying the Bantu migrations would have allowed whichever colonial power that ends up planting its flag in OTL Cape Town in this scenario, be they European, Arab, Indian, Austronesian, or someone else, to become a solid majority of the population in at least OTL South Africa?
 
How about relatively lesser-known African ethnolinguistic groups such as the Ijo (the people of Niger Delta region)?
 
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Hasn’t it been argued that even somewhat delaying the Bantu migrations would have allowed whichever colonial power that ends up planting its flag in OTL Cape Town in this scenario, be they European, Arab, Indian, Austronesian, or someone else, to become a solid majority of the population in at least OTL South Africa?
Source?
 
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