CHAPTER 35
Who Are You?
Africa and Africans
Brent D. Shaw
Becoming African
In a letter to his former teacher from the city of Madauros, the Christian bishop Augus-
tine of Hippo wrote to the “pagan” rhetor Maximus: “well now, [you] as an African
writing to other Africans, and since we are both from Africa...” (Aug.Ep. 17.2). Augus-
tine’s deliberate seeking of a common ground in being African was, it must be confessed,
a rhetorical gambit. It was a powerful ploy because the identity to which the appeal was
made was a strong one of real substance. Not only among Christians such as Augustine,
but also among non-Christians of the time, being African had become an identity that
they shared in common. How this came to be was the end result of a long process. As
late as the first centuryCE, no persons of Punic background, no Italian or Greek settlers
living in the region that we today call North Africa thought of themselves as “Africans,”
nor, least of all, did the indigenous inhabitants of the land. The beginnings of creating
the new identity probably followed a path that ethnic labeling has often travelled in the
past. The first local people that an outsider or incoming group encountered became a
surrogate for all other peoples who were “like them.” In the case of the ancient Maghrib,
this seems to have happened when a regional people located inland from Carthage, in
the region of Wadi Tine, known as theAfri, were encountered (C.8.25850; Suas, mod-
ern Chaouach; see Kotula 1965, corrected by Peyras 1985). They became stand-ins for
all other local or indigenous inhabitants of the land. Others like them becameAfri,or
Africani, and, metonymically, the land was called Africa. Over time, by cultural and politi-
cal extension, the term came to designate a continental mass—the Third World, thetertia
pars mundi, of their time—as it was seen by outsiders in the Roman Mediterranean (e.g.,
Varro,LL, 5.31; Sall.Bell. Iug. 17.3; Mela,De Chorogr. 1.2.0–4.2; Pliny,NH, 3.1.3;
implicitly in Tert.de Pall.2.6).
A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean, First Edition. Edited by Jeremy McInerney.
© 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2014 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.