The brief duration and history of early Christianity in north Africa is an excellent example of George Orwell's sardonic strictures in 1984. It has become politically attractive and virtually a truism to claim, as W.H.C. Frend does, that Mediterranean Africa, centred on Alexandria and Carthage, ‘was the scene of a prosperous and brilliant Christian civilization’ from the time of Constantine to the Islamic conquest, from the fourth to the mid-seventh centuries (1978, 410), and that ‘the Christian leaders, Augustine of Hippo (AD 354–430) and Cyril of Alexandria (d. AD 444), moulded the teaching of the Latin and Greek Churches respectively in a way that has survived for centuries’ (ibid.) Such views have been echoed by every revisionist historian of Africa since the 1960s. Thus, J.D. Fage charges in the Cambridge History of Africa that ‘the idea that Christianity is more a religion of Europeans than of Africans would in fact have been totally impossible prior to the rise of Islam’ (1978, 7), while John Iliffe, in his equally influential Africans: The History of a Continent, claims: ‘Perhaps only in pharaonic times had [north Africa] been more central to human progress than in the 3rd and 4th centuries AD, when it was the intellectual spearhead of Christianity’ (1995, 37).

In more bizarre formats, such claims also emerge in North American black interpretations of the Bible, from the nineteenth century onward. So, for instance, Henry Highland Garnet insisted that Moses had married a black Ethiopian and that figures such as Cyprian, Origen and Augustine had been black (Kidd, 2006, 252). Robert Benjamin Lewis made similar claims, including also Tertullian on the list, and maintaining ‘that Christian theology was a product of the Black intellect’ (ibid., 253), while W.L. Hunter was convinced that ‘Jesus Christ had Negro Blood in his veins’ (op. cit.).