One of the worst things that can happen to someone is to not know who he is. Both the Arab and European enslavers made sure they severed the enslaved Africans from their ethnic identities and re-wrote history to make the continent seem backward and primitive until they came to bring “civilization” to the land. Many archaeologist and historians are researching the works of ancient Greeks, Romans, and other witnesses (including Africans themselves) and are admitting that black men and women built and ruled some of the most advanced civilizations of the past.
In learning the roles Africans played in early Christianity, I think it is necessary to be familiar with the origin of blacks in the Mediterranean world. Before it’s desertification, the Sahara region was populated with African farmers, herdsmen and hunters. About 4000 BC, the tilt in the earth’s axis caused the monsoonal rains to move away from the area. Most of the people drifted south and west. But there were other black people who settled the shores of the Mediterranean and Nile River Valley. Cut off from the southerners by a great desert, they interacted with other people who made trade routes in the sea.
Certainly there were conquest by the Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians long before imperial Macedonia and Rome. But there was no racial supremacy as would be developed much later. There were times when Nubians ruled Egypt with some Levant communities having significant “Ethiopian” populations. Phoenician traders blended with native Africans and developed Punic societies from Carthage to Mauritania (modern Morocco). The Garamanties developed ways to harness water along the edge of the Libyan Desert. Ancient Aksum ruled stretches of the African Horn, Arabian Peninsula, and controlled trade to India.
Being able to communicate and having goods to trade meant more than skin color. Africans with their exotic animal products were key players in the Mediterranean world’s marketplace. With this trade would also come the exchange of ideas and thought. This is especially well noted with their interactions with the Israelites, Greeks and Romans. These will be my topics on October 17 & 31.
St. Djan Darada Fellowship 
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