In the Roman Empire The Roman-Africans first adopted the Roman pantheon under the rule of the
Roman Republic, but then were one of the first provinces to convert to Christianity. Among their best-known figures were
Saint Felicita, Saint Perpetua,
Saint Cyprian and
Saint Augustine. Unlike the so-called
Mauri that mostly inhabited the westernmost part of Northwest Africa and were barely Romanized, Roman Africans (like
Septimus Severus or saint
Aurelius Augustinus) had Latin names in addition to speaking Latin. (modern
El Djem,
Tunisia). The African province was among the wealthiest regions in the Empire (rivaled only by Egypt, Syria and Italy itself) and as a consequence people from all over the Empire migrated into the province. Large numbers of
Roman Army veterans settled in Northwest Africa on farming plots promised for their military service. Even so, the Roman military presence of Northwest Africa was relatively small because of the safety of the province; the Romans did not require a large military presence in North Africa since it was not a target for external attacks or rebellions. When the need arose, the relative proximity of the region to Italia made it possible to dispatch armies from Italia to North Africa very easily. By the second century AD, the
Fossa Regia province of North Africa had a population three-fourths Italic, was fully Latinized and embraced the Hellenic Religion. The North African garrison consisted of about 28,000 troops and auxiliaries in
Numidia. Starting in the 2nd century AD, these garrisons were composed mostly of local inhabitants. A sizable
Latin speaking population developed from a multinational background, sharing the northwest African region with those speaking
Punic and
Berber languages. Imperial security forces began to be drawn from the local population, including the Berbers. By the end of the Western Roman Empire, nearly all of the African province was fully
Romanized, according to
Theodor Mommsen in his
The Provinces of the Roman Empire. Roman Africans enjoyed a high level of prosperity. Such prosperity (and romanization) touched partially even the populations living outside of the
Roman limes (mainly the
Garamantes and the
Getuli).
Post-Roman period and Islamic rule The Roman African populations kept their
Latin language, as well as their
Nicene-
Chalcedonian Christian religion, under the Germanic
Vandal occupation, the Byzantine restoration, and the Islamic conquest, where they progressively converted to Islam until the near-extinction of Christianity in the Maghreb in the 12th century under the
Almohads. The
African Romance Latin dialect constituted a significant
substratum of the modern varieties of the
Berber languages and
Maghrebi Arabic. After
their conquest, the Muslim conquerors distinguished three distinct categories of population in Northwest Africa: the foreign population from
Rūm (
(Eastern) Roman Empire), mainly composing the military and administrative elite, who generally spoke Greek; the
Afāriqah: the Roman Africans, the native Latin-speaking community mostly concentrated in the urban areas; and finally the
Barbar ( بربر ): that is, the Berber farmers that populated most of the rural countryside. In his 1903 work ''L'Algerie dans l’antiquité'', French archaeologist
Stéphane Gsell alleged that Berber peasants in some areas of the
Aurès and
Greater Kabyle regions claimed to be descendants of the Romans. In 1904 and 1905, other reports was published alleging that the
Zkara tribe in Morocco claimed to be Christians and "descendants of the Romans", though they did not have a belief in the afterlife and barely any actual knowledge of Christianity, with their exact religious and cultural practices revolving more around an aversion to Islam than around any identifiable form of Christianity. ==See also==