Northern Africa played a huge role in early Christianity. I am not saying that these early Christian theologians were all Black, but I am say that Africans played a significant role in the creation of Church doctrine and history.
From Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years by Diarmaid MacCulloch
"The story of Christianity in Africa into the early modern period is ... one of defensiveness and decline nearly everywhere, leading inexorably to its complete extinction along the North African coast and in Nubia. The North African Church, the first stronghold of Latin Christianity, the home of Tertullian, Cyprian, and Augustine of Hippo, should be given credit for surviving the Arab conquest of the 690's for some five centuries in certain areas, but it never recovered its unity after the bitterness of the fourth- and fifth-century divisions between the Donatists and the Catholic elite which was in communion with the wider Mediterranean Church. Eventually, in the twelfth century, the rigidly intolerant Almohad dynasty insisted on mass conversions of both Jews and Christians....
Western Christians have forgotten that before the coming of Islam utterly transformed the situation in eastern Mediterranean and Asia, there was a good chance that the center of gravity of Christian faith might have moved east to Iraq rather than to Rome. Instead, the ancient Christianity of the East was nearly everywhere faced with a destiny of contraction in numbers, suffering from martyrdom which still continues. But there is one practical consequence of the fifteenth century Latin delusion that Prester John might unite with Western Christians. The myth generated an optimism which had a vital galvanizing effect on Latin Christianity, so it played a part in that surprising new expansion worldwide which from the fifteenth century led Western Catholicism and Protestantism to become the dominant form of Christian faith into modern times."
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