[Pelham]

“Fast forward two centuries or so and the King of the Colchester area was Old King Cole of nursery rhyme fame. Supposedly, he got his name from the city and his skin color, so was most likely a North African Berber by ancestry.”

If he was a Berber his skin wouldn’t have been black. Berber nomads are a mixed ethnicity but the mix is of peoples you find along the Mediterranean. Olive skinned Caucasians. The Sahara walls off the Maghreb from black Africa.

[Vigilanteman]

You need to look at legends in the context of their time. Legend has it that Hannibal's army (and his alliance) were full of dark-skinned people. Sicilians are dark-skinned compared to the people of Milan or Venice. Berbers are dark-skinned compared to the Anglo-Saxons.

The pirates of the Mediterranean who enslaved Europeans during their salad days of the 16th and 17th centuries were referred to as "Turks" even though they were most likely from what is now the Maghreb.

Yeah, the PC crowd, particularly in Hollywood, gets ahold of these factoids and portrays these rather despicable figures as heroic figures, enhanced by much darker skin as you would find in central Africa which, by the way, is NOT where Hannibal got his elephants. The Sahara was less expansive then than now, but still presented a formidable barrier.