Afri

Afri (singular Afer) was a Latin name for the inhabitants of Africa, referring in its widest sense to all the lands south of the Mediterranean (Ancient Libya). Latin-speakers at first used afer as an adjective, meaning "of Africa". As a substantive, it denoted a native of Africa, i. e., an African.

The ultimate etymology of the term for the country remains uncertain. It may derive from a Punic term for an indigenous population of the area surrounding Carthage. (See Terence for discussion.) The name is usually connected with Phoenician ʿafar, "dust", (also found in other Semitic languages), but a 1981 hypothesis has asserted that it stems from the Berber ifri (plural ifran) "cave", in reference to cave dwellers. (See Tataouine.) The same word may be found in the name of the Banu Ifran from Algeria and Tripolitania, a Berber tribe originally from Yafran (also known as Ifrane) in northwestern Libya. The classical historian Flavius Josephus (born 37 CE) asserted that descendants of Abraham's grandson Epher invaded the region and gave it their own name.

During the period of the Roman Empire, Afer came to be a cognomen for people from Africa Proconsularis.

This ethnonym provided the source of the term Africa. The Romans referred to the region as Africa terra (land of the Afri), based on the stem Afr- with the adjective suffix -ic- (giving Africus, Africa, Africum in the nominative singular of the three Latin genders). Following the defeat of Carthage in the Third Punic War, Rome set up the province of Africa Proconsularis.

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