Who are you? The question had been at the center of the crisis in African Christianity, as bishops and priests, deacons and lay persons, landowners and tenants, fishermen and money-changers, craftsmen and civil servants, and itinerant gangs of young men and women mobilized the full panoply of memory, knowledge, and emotion that guided their actions as Christians. As the partisans of each side exerted themselves to enforce their communal identities, specific types of violent acts were excited at the peripheries of the struggle, creating more particulars of the world in which they lived. But given the plurality of identities from which an individual might choose or have activated in a given situation, being Christian was only one. And certain elements of identity were more permanent and powerful than others; some of the most important, like language, were fixed at a very early age. Identity, in itself, is not an adequate approach to the problem. In the sectarian confrontations of the long fourth century, the reported incidents of violence rarely, if ever, emerged from identity alone. There were the additional, and necessary, elements of the mobilizing powers and capacities of large formal organizations like the Roman state and its armed forces, municipal councils and law courts, local and provincial church hierarchies, and the patronal resources of large landowners.

What is more, in disputing and defining their individual and collective identities, the Christian dissidents and Catholics behaved in certain ways, but mostly in stable normal day-to-day relations, only occasionally breaking into episodes of violence against each other. All of these behaviors, including the violent acts, were a game played according to certain rules. The elaborate conventions depended on the continued existence of a complex set of social behaviors and institutions which required deliberation, constant attention, and energy to keep in place. Then, suddenly, almost everything in this set of social regulations was irrevocably changed by a massive armed incursion. In the spring of 429 – or was it 428? – a large war band, whose leadership and ethnic core were composed mainly of Germanic Vandals, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from southern Spain into the isolated remnant of Roman rule in the far west of Africa around the town of Tingi. Gaining a foothold in north Africa through its vulnerable back door, they began making their way eastward in fits of plundering and killing that forever changed the economic, social, political, administrative, and religious face of lands that had been among the most important provinces of the Roman empire.