This book has been some thirty years in the making, although its effective composition could only begin once I had retired from Rhodes University in 2002. Over the previous decades the project had, however, grown substantially from what would have been little more than another identification and dismantlement of reprehensible Eurocolonial prejudices about Africa and Africans from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. What has emerged instead is the more ambitious quest, in Egyptian, classical and early Christian traditions, for the origins and earliest manifestations of the Mediterranean world's founding conceptions of – and prejudices about – the subcontinent to the south of the Sahara.

During the years that I pondered this theme and amassed the evidence, many debates have risen and sunk in the (at times) superheated polemics of postcolonial and postmodernist debate. In the Introduction, I chart my own way through these minefields of cultural history in order to explain why the main study that follows has taken the shape and directions it has. Readers not interested in the convolutions and clashes of postcolonialist and cultural discourse should feel free to skip the Introduction and to enter the argument with Homer and the ancient ‘Ethiopians’ in Chapter 1.

Over three decades, I have incurred many debts, to friends and colleagues, as well as to funders and institutions, and I must here attempt to pay tribute to them. Two of my former mentors and colleagues, the late Guy Butler (Rhodes University) and the late Aldon D. Bell (University of Washington) in the 1970s planted the first ideas that have now come to fruition. They would be surprised by the outcome, but not, I hope, disappointed. At Cambridge in the 1980s, I had the pleasure of meeting W.H.C. Frend, doyen of authorities on early Christian North Africa, and to him I am indebted for setting my mind in the directions pursued in Chapter 11. Since the 1970s, several colleagues at Rhodes have continued to contribute to my contemplations of the images of Africa, among them Gareth Cornwell, Dan Wylie, Paul Walters, Warren Snowball, and the late Don Maclennan, and I thank them here.