Lost African Civilizations - Benin

General
1

With its mathematical layout and earthworks longer than the Great Wall of China, Benin City was one of the best planned cities in the world when London was a place of ‘thievery and murder’. So why is nothing left?

The Portuguese arrived on the shores of Sierra Leone in 1460. Disembarking at cities that were as large, complex, and technologically advanced as Lisbon at the time, the Portuguese actually experienced far less culture shock than we might expect. In fact, they encountered urban centers in West Africa comparable to those back in Europe, governed by elaborate dynasties, organized around apprenticeship-based artistic guilds, and with agricultural systems capable of feeding their large populaces. Many African cities were even deemed to be larger, more hygienic, and better organized than those of Europe.

[ATTACH=full]339005[/ATTACH]

“Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see,” wrote Portuguese ship captain Lourenço Pinto in 1691. He added, “The houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. The city is wealthy and industrious. It is so well governed that theft is unknown and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses.”

The Walls of Benin, one of Africa’s ancient architectural marvels, were destroyed by the British in 1897 during what has become known as the Punitive Expedition. This shocking act destroyed more than a thousand years of Benin history and some of the earliest evidence of rich African civilisations.

The astounding city was a series of earthworks made up of banks and ditches, called “Iya” in the Edo language, in the area around present-day Benin City. They consist of 15 kilometers of city Iya and an estimated 16 000 kilometers in the rural area around Benin. The walls stood for over 400 years, protecting the inhabitants of the kingdom, as well as the traditions and civilisation of the Edo people.

Fred Pearce wrote the following about the city in the science magazine New Scientist: “In all, they are four times longer than the Great Wall of China and consumed a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. They took an estimated 150 million hours of digging to construct and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet.”

The Guinness Book of Records (1974 edition) described the walls of Benin City and its surrounding kingdom as “the world’s largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era”. It was one of the first cities to have a semblance of street lighting with huge metal lamps, many feet high, built and placed around the city.

Benin City’s planning and design was done according to careful rules of symmetry, proportionality and repetition now known as “fractal design”.

Ethnomathematician (the study of the relationship between mathematics and culture) Ron Eglash has discussed the planned layout of the city, commenting that “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture disorganised and thus primitive. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”

The great Benin City is lost to history after its decline began in the 15th century. This decline was sparked by internal conflicts linked to the increasing European intrusion and slavery trade at the borders of the Benin empire. It was then completely ruined in the British Punitive expedition in the 1890s, when the city was looted, blown up and razed to the ground by British troops.

[ul]
[li] https://www.historyanswers.co.uk/people-politics/the-real-wakanda-inside-the-lost-city-of-benin/ [/li][li] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/mar/18/story-of-cities-5-benin-city-edo-nigeria-mighty-medieval-capital-lost-without-trace [/li][li] https://www.thiscityknows.com/lost-utopia-in-africa-theft-was-unknown-and-people-did-not-have-doors-to-their-houses-in-old-benin-city/ [/li][li] https://thisisafrica.me/politics-and-society/african-marvels-the-walls-of-benin/ [/li][/ul]

2

They did not teach us this in history class. African, teach thyself

3

Deleted from history books

4

We also had great empires in West Africa that we never learnt in schools. These were led by black people not North Africans. We had sophisticated kingdoms that spanned millions of square kilometers that included the Ghana and the Mali empires (not to be confused with the present day countries since they had overlapping geographies and boundaries going all the way to Lake Chad, present day Nigeria and Cameroon, as well Senegal and Mauritania).

Other impressive black-led empires included, Songhai, Solinke, Kush, Kongo, etc. I am sure talkers here can add much more or even correct my assertions on the geography and boundary delimitations of the Mali and Ghana empires.

All the same, to the talker who posted this, thank you for reminding everyone here on this platform how much we don’t know black history.

5

Africans were invaded and their culture and heritage destroyed since they lacked unity and the will to resist invaders.

6

Shida ya mwafrika ni kutojiamini. Wafrika loves anything and everything foreign.

7

https://www.history.com/news/british-museum-stolen-artifacts-nigeria
Theft of Benin artifacts. Nigerians have been demanding for the return of these artifacts. By the way ancient Benin was in Nigeria and has nothing to do with the modern day African country called Benin.

8

We neee to embrace our culture and traditions, ditch everything that is foreign and unite as one.

9

And they don’t teach you that the congo forest might have lost civilizations buried deep, and also that Most deserts are as a result of nuked Civilizations back in Antiquity.

10

and how sure are we this “deleted history” is true history?
remember, they are the ones who recorded history and preserved it. they can “leak” pieces of history which they have also doctored, to give one hope that we were once Kangz and Quenz and Shit

11

So you believe White man was the first man to see Mt. Kenya??

12

no.
they were the first white people to see mt Kenya.

my query is with the African history which most/i of us never knew about. whos the source? is it skewed?
how much of our known history is ours and not that influence/translated by the white person?

13

If I had a time machine I’d bring back photo effidense

14

You are not familiar with the history because it wasn’t part of your institutionalized education because the white man doesn’t want you to know.

15

Formal education in most parts of Africa to this day is still funded by the imperialists.
Most Africans started learning the real history from the internet because the schools teach very limited history. My journey started around 2007 when I was seeing how hostile the white supremacists were that Obama had the audacity to stand to be President. That made me look into racism with a new eye and naturally that led to curiosity of the real history of Kenya.
I have said before that the the imperialists made a huge mistake to create something that allows the truth to spread freely. They created the internet. Before internet it was easy to control mass media. They would just restrict licensing of media houses and restrict the content of the media houses.
The more Africans learn the truth the harder it is getting for the imperialists to continue dominate us, exploit us or divide us.

16

Fact is the Europeans had advanced to a new age. Just like the chinese before them. Thats why you have the portuguese landing in Benin and not the Benin landing in Lisbon.

17

What if they are tucked somewhere in The Vatican library.

18

this is just it.
how come now they are allowing us to have all this information?

and haven’t we heard of conspiracies where they create a story and control how it goes? so is all the information given out especially on Africans, the truth or is it just some controlled narrative by the imperialists?

and who is giving out this information? (a rogue imperialist or can we assume Africans have always kept records of their history?)

19

The stolen bronze artifacts from Benin are on display in European to-date. Also, the stories are very well documented; and are told not only told by the English, but by the Portuguese as well.

The stories have always been there. Just because you may not have heard of them does not mean that they are now just emerging. It’s only that with the Internet, we are able to access resources that were hitherto outside of our reach. Also, many of the supporting documents were in some cases classified eg. the atrocities visited upon the Mau Mau in the 1950s were only declassified in 2012.

In April 2011, the British government admitted that it had a secret archive over two thousand boxes, 8,800 files from 37 former colonies, which had been brought back from these former colonies when they became independent. It did so only because it was forced by a judge in the High Court. Foreign Secretary William Hague declared that efforts would be made to release them promptly to the public through the National Archives, “subject only to legal exemptions”.

There’s more in the Pandora’s box!!

20

good.
(but am always skeptical of powerful people who hold information and what they do or how they release said information. let’s hope nothing was compromised or they’ll give out all information)

and is it really pandora’s box?
i think only to them and the world knows how “evil” they are. to us Africans, we won’t do much with the information that we was Kings and Queens. we are too far brainwashed to rise again from the ashes.