Where are the Roman Africans / Latinized Berbers in HIP? (Afri / Afāriqah)

[ArmoMoose]

North Africa was part of the Roman Empire since after the defeat of Carthage, and one of its most prosperous provinces for that matter. The city dwelling North African populations later became Latinized / Romanized, speaking their own form of vulgar Latin. When the Arabs conquered the Maghreb they identified three groups in North Africa, the Berbers, Greeks and the Afāriqah, who spoke Latin. If the Arabs identified them after conquering North Africa between the 7th and 8th centuries, the Afri must've at least still been the majority in some areas by the 9th century (Viking Age start date). So I find it incredibly strange that they're not the majority in even one province, hell, they're even depicted in the vanilla game with the Catholic provinces in North Africa. But not at all in HIP. Which I find strange because HIP adds so many, and expands even further on existing cultures. The last Latin writing out of North Africa is from the 13th century, meaning that Latin was definitely still spoken to a degree by some people - even though they might have been converted to Islam, and been heavily influenced by Arab culture. Latin also influenced North African Arabic dialects, with many words coming directly out of Latin.

So in my opinion there should be a culture in HIP that depicts these people, with their religion being Catholicism. I don't know that much about the subject, and I haven't read any scholarly articles on the matter, so excuse me if the HIP developers have already done their research and decided against adding the Afri in HIP.

 

[elvain]

If there is anything wrong, it would be mainly my fault.
I have done the research for the original overhaul of the region (although later the team did some additional work on it and fixed some errors I made) and in the many dozens of articles and books, I haven't found mentions about Latin population being a majority in any territory large enough to constitute a province (99% of the sources, including micro-regional studies, don't mention them at all).

Later some forumites, who have been promoting the ideas of Roman world surviving much more into medieval period than we have thought/known redirected me to few articles dedicated entirely to this population and after some (short, but not thorough) reading I had to admit that some Latinized people have survived longer than I thought in the Maghreb and could have a majority in few cities as well as some rural communities. As far as I have learned, in the late 11th century they were, if anything, almost entirely isolated communities, although they could still manage to hold majority in some towns and cities.

Since at that moment I already left the SWMH team, I never debated this topic in the team and if I would be part of the discussion, I would still be against. Although I have to admit I would still need to read a little more about the topic. But I need to admit that I probably am little biased against inclusion of cultures like this. The academic articles mentioning it are in 99% titles entirely dedicated to this kind of minority/forgotten people and they usually don't hide an intent to promote them. As far as I have dealt with this kind of literature, with all respect to it being good academic work, way too often I find it to be strongly biased in favour of these peoples and way too often ignoring or partialy distorting general trends in larger societies surrounding them. I do admit I'm overly sceptical, I am most probably at least a little biased and hence not objectively judging, and with all that in mind I can very well be wrong in this particular topic.

Admitting that I still haven't read everything I could about the topic (there's entire book on them of which I read only some parts) and therefore possibly not being informed enough, I agree that those people could be given majority in few of the cities in which they were mentioned by contemporary sources. But I would still be against giving them entire province. Since I know reserves in my knowledge, I can't rule out changing my mind. It's just my personal preference based on my decades long studies of Maghrebi medieval history which wasn't targeted at studing this particular community but rather the political and social history and trends leading the major regional developments.
Perhaps provinding good sources which will prove the existence of the community in some academic articles or books, especially those not which aren't entirely dedicated or promotig the Afariqa and similar latinized populations might help change things?

But my opinion doesn't really matter anymore since I'm not in HIP dev team for at least 4 years now