How did you came to study the history of Africa? Of North Africa specifically?Dana Marniche Reynolds : In truth I had gotten tired of all of the depictions in movies and media and museums of Egyptians and Moors as non-Africans. I knew from my readings that they were basically contradictory to whay all early writers had said. I had known from reading another Black history classic called “Nature Knows No Color Line” that peoples like Strabo, Platus, Procopius, Claudian, Martial, Juvenal, Corippus, Claudian and St. Isidore and many others had identified the Moors as black and Egyptians as black, and kinky-haired.I also knew from Diop’s book, African Origins of Civilization, that Diop had had a dispute with historian Raymond Mauny about the ancestors of European people with surnames that were variations of the name Moor- such as Morell, Moran, Moorman, Morini, etc. Mauny had dismissed the thought that people with such names could have had ancestors were really blacks, or “Negro”. However, J. A. Rogers years before had published in his book the paintings from European heraldry of heads of purely black African men with woolly hair possessing these exact same names. And these men looked more like West Africans than like so-called “hamites”. So naturally I was curious to find out which peoples they came from since they didn’t look like the modern day inhabitants of the North African coast.
https://www.nofi.media/2018/05/dana-marniche/53221