Were the first Arabs Africans?
Meet the Arab Saleh (Mehri) people of Somalia, Socotra islands and Southern Arabia (Yemen and Oman):
(A man from the Mehri tribe)
The Arab Saleh people, also known as the Mehri, is an ethnic group of Somali lineage that has a long history of inhabiting Somalia, Southern Yemen and the Socotra islands. It is a tribe that is known for its peace, neighbourhood and its good relations with other Somali tribes. The tribe is famous for raising livestock, and their camels are one of the best in the region.
The Arab Saleh people mostly speak their own language called the Mehri language. The Mehri language, though influenced by Arabic in its later years, is a distnict language that belongs to the Modern South Arabian language family. It is known that the South Arabian languages predate the presence of Arabic in the region by thousands of years and are closely related to the Ethiopian Semitic dialects in the Horn of Africa.
The Mehri of Somalia dwell in the places called Nugal, Bari, and Mudug. Their primary occupation is trade; the Mehri are one of the people who have connected Somalia, the Arabian peninsula and the various countries of East Africa for centuries.
The tribe is famous for being religiously conservative, their hospitality and their freindliness. Many Somalis were born in Mehri villages, such as officials, scholars, businessmen and many other famous Somali people.
The works of promenient Afro-Asiatic scholars like Roger Blench and Christopher Ehret indicate that the Mehri people, and the various related ethnicities of Southern Arabia have significant ancestry from ancient Cushitic/Nilo-Saharan migrations into the Arabian peninsula. These groups were later Semiticized and assimiliated by incoming Semitic invasions from the Near East, who spoke languages ancestral to the Modern South Arabian (MSA) and Ethio-Semitic languages spoken in Southern Arabia and the Horn of Africa. The more recent expansion of Islam and the Arabic language has also significantly altered the cultural and genetic identity of the people of the region.
