while bantu-speaking peoples were colonising southern africa, the north was entering one of its greatest historical periods. Perhaps only in pharaonic times had it been more central to human progress than in the third and fourth centuries ad, when it was the intellectual spearhead of Christianity, and again 800 years later, when it was the pivot of Islam and a commercial network encompassing most of the Old World. This leadership, already threatened, was destroyed during the fourteenth century by the demographic catastrophe of the Black Death, from which the region took 500 years to recover. But in their time of greatness, North Africans adapted Christianity and Islam to their own cultures and transmitted both religions to Black Africa, where centuries of internal development had prepared social environments for their reception and further adaptation.

CHRISTIANITY IN NORTH AFRICA

Legend said that St Mark himself brought Christianity to Alexandria in ad 61. In reality the church in Jerusalem probably sent missionaries to Alexandria's large Jewish community. The first firm evidence of Christianity there comes from an early second-century controversy between Jews who had and those who had not accepted the new faith. Shortly afterwards Christianity expanded beyond this Jewish nucleus. By ad 200 there was a Greek-speaking church under a Bishop of Alexandria, with many Christians in Upper as well as Lower Egypt.