In the first century AD, a Roman wrote, marveling at the abundance of Arab ships on the eastern coasts of Africa and praising the Arabs' ability to live among the indigenous people even in that distant time. They intermarried, so lineages mixed, and conflict found no way between them. Arabs came from the Arabian Peninsula and from every direction, and they settled on the eastern African coast.

Thus, the early ages of history witnessed Arab peoples and tribes setting out from the heart of the Arabian Peninsula in different directions, including Africa. These were Semitic peoples and tribes, and no single tribe could consider itself, all of one people, as Arab to the exclusion of the inhabitants of those lands. The concept of Arab identity had not yet emerged.

The migration of Arabs from the Arabian Peninsula to the African continent, as individuals and groups since prehistoric times and over the years and generations, resulted in increasing Arab influences in the African regions inhabited by Arabs, especially in the Horn of Africa, the Nile Valley, and North Africa. So much so that we can say that when the light of Islam appeared in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century AD, these African regions were already semi-Arab and had gone a long way in their Arabization over thousands of years, surpassing what could be called the stage of self-assertion in the path to Arab identity or pre-true Arabization.

From here, the Nile Valley region, north and south, was semi-Arab regions centuries before the appearance of the light of Islam.

These Arab tribes took several crossings and different routes on their way to the Nile Valley region and the east of the African continent from their homelands, where they were able to reach the Nile Valley and the heart of the continent, where conditions were favorable for settlement.