Roman Africans


Roman-Africans were the ancient Northwest African populations of Roman North Africa that had a Romanized culture and used to speak their own variety of Latin as a result. They existed mostly from the Roman conquest in the antiquity until their language gradually faded out after the Arab conquest of North Africa in the Early Middle Ages.
Roman Africans lived in all the coastal cities of contemporary Tunisia, Western Libya and Eastern Algeria. This area became known under Arab rule as Ifriqiya, an Arabized version of the name of the Roman province of Africa.
The Roman Africans were generally local Berbers or Punics, but also the descendants of the populations that came directly from Rome itself or the diverse regions of the Empire as legionaries and senators.

Language

Characteristics

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 and among their most known figures we can mention Saint Felicita, Saint Perpetua, Saint Cyprian and Saint Augustine. Contrarily to the so-called Mauri that mostly inhabited the westernmost part of Northwest Africa and were barely romanised, Roman Africans had Latin names in addition to speaking Latin.
The African province was amongst the wealthiest regions in the Empire 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, consisting of about 28,000 troops and auxiliaries in Numidia. Starting in the 2nd century AD, these garrisons were manned mostly by 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 romanised, according to Theodor Mommsen in his The Provinces of the Roman Empire. Roman Africans enjoyed a high level of prosperity. Such prosperity touched partially even the populations living outside of the Roman limes.
The Roman African populations kept their Latin language, as well as their Catholic Christian religion, under the Germanic Vandal occupation, the Byzantine restoration and the Islamic conquest, where they progressively converted to Islam until the 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.
The Muslim conquerors indeed distinguished in the 7th century three distinct categories of populations in Northwest Africa: the foreign population from Rūm, 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 : that is, the Berber farmers that populated most of the rural countryside.