““Christianity in this region remained as much a colonists’ religion as it would be once again during the French Empire of the twentieth century, and, just as in that later period, when the colonists left, so did the religion. Long wars during the sixth and seventh centuries forced many Romanized Africans to flee to other parts of the Mediterranean, and the Arab conquest virtually completed this process. As a Victorian scholar noted, “[T]he African churches were destroyed not because they were corrupt but because they failed to reach the hearts of the true natives of the province…. They fell because they were the churches of a party and not of a people.”4 Muslims did not have to eradicate African Christianity, because its believers had already fled.””
