Hello, I don't post here often, but I saw this and had to weigh in.  I fear Mr. Vintage is badly misinformed.  First off, the makers of Civilization V and Rome Total War II are not the same people, so boycotting one to harm the other is unlikely to do much damage to the  the intended target.

Secondly, Africa is a geographic expression not an ethnic or "racial" one.  Africa is a very large place, with diverse peoples who have often been divided by difficult terrain.  Simply because someone is from Africa, does not mean you would automatically consider them "black".  Race is a can of worms, that most anthropologists would rather not get into.  It's inexact, full of political pitfalls, and nationalist pride.  I don't know what Hannibal looked like.   There is no uncontested image of him surviving in the modern day.  His appearance and race was probably similar to his countrymen and those people probably appeared similar to the ones that live in Tunisia today.  Terms like "Hamitic" and "Semetic" are outdated and no longer used much outside of loopy race scientists.  In fact the "Hamatic" and "Semetic" languages now considered the same language group, Afro-Asiatic.

We know the Carthagenians spoke an Afro-Asiatic language like the rest of the people of North Africa.  Language is not a good indicator of race though.  Afro-Asiatic is spoken by people living in such far away places as Mali, Somalia, Israel, Iraq, Malta, and Morrocco and there is a wide range of morphology in these people.  Still, I would say that most people of North Africa 2300 years ago looked like the people of North Africa today.

Dr. Ivan Van Sertima is to put it bluntly, a crank.  He is similar to the race scientists of the early 20th century and has made bizzare claims such the Mesoamerican peoples being African immigrants.  He is in the same league as those who tried to prove that an Aryan race founded civilization and thus can be safely ignored.

Lastly, I would like to point out that trying to find empowerment and racial pride in the civilizations of North Africa (Carthage, Egypt, etc) is a quiotixic endevor at best for African Americans.  Most African Americans are decended from subsaharan West Africans (along with a healthy dose of European blood.)  North Africans did occasionally cross the Sahara into West Africa, but mostly to buy slaves, thus creating the great slave markets that Europeans would later exploit in the colonization of the New World.  Your Average African American might have some ancestors who were North Africans, but he's more likely to have Viking blood then that of a Pharoh.  An African American taking pride in the works of Ancient Egypt is like an Swede taking pride in the building of the Great Wall of China.  It's possible that some of his ancestors worked on it, but not very likely.  Simply because Sweden and China are on the same landmass (Eurasia), doesn't mean they had a lot of contact in the pre-modern world.  The same goes for Africa, which has some of the harshest enviroments in the world and travel was noriously difficult.