Princeton/Stanford Working Papers in Classics Who Are You? Africa and Africans Version 1.3 September 2011 Brent D. Shaw Princeton University Abstract: This is the third revised version of a chapter that is being prepared for the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean. © Brent D.
[email protected] 2 Who Are You? Africa and Africans Brent D. Shaw In a letter written to his former teacher from the city of Madauros, the Christian bishop Augustine of Hippo addressed the rhetor Maximus by saying, ‘well now, as one African writing to another African, and since we are both from Africa...’ (Aug. Ep. 17.2 = CCL 31: 41; 390 CE). His deliberate seeking of common ground in being ‘African’ was, it should be confessed, a rhetorical gambit. It was a powerful ploy because the identity to which appeal was made was a strong one of real substance. Not only among Christians like Augustine, but also among non-Christian interlocutors of the time like Maximus, being African had become an identity that they shared in common. How this came to be was the result of a long process of changes and responses. As late as the first century CE, no persons of Punic background, or any indigenous inhabitants of the land, or any Italian, Etruscan, or Greek settlers living in the region that we today call North Africa ever thought of themselves as ‘African,’ even if the matrix for this new identity was beginning to be formed all around them. The process of creating the new identity followed a path that ethnic labelling had often travelled in the past.