Lost history · c. 11th century–1897
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Earth walls that by one estimate ran four times the length of the Great Wall of China. Straight streets 120 feet wide, lamps burning palm oil at night, and clay walls polished like mirrors. Old Benin was one of the great planned cities of the world, and almost nothing of it is left.
Benin City was first known as Edo. It was the capital of one of the oldest and most developed states in West Africa, a kingdom whose roots, according to a 2016 Guardian essay by Mawuna Koutonin, go back to the 11th century.
The city sat on a flat plain. To protect it, its people built huge walls of earth on the south side and dug deep ditches on the north. But they did not stop at the city. Out in the countryside around the capital, more walls were raised, dividing the land into about 500 separate villages, each with its own boundary.
How big was all this? Nobody has a tape measure long enough, so we have estimates. The 1974 edition of the Guinness Book of Records called the walls of Benin City and its kingdom the largest earthworks ever made before the age of machines. Fred Pearce, writing for New Scientist, went further. He worked out that the walls, at one point, were four times longer than the Great Wall of China and used a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid in Egypt.
Pearce put the total at about 16,000 kilometres of walls, forming a patchwork of more than 500 connected settlement boundaries across 6,500 square kilometres. All of it, he stressed, was dug by Edo people. He guessed it took around 150 million hours of digging. He thought it might be the largest single archaeological feature on the planet.
Think about what that means. There were no bulldozers. Every bit of that earth was dug and moved by people.
And yet, the essay says, barely any trace of these walls can be seen today.
Inside the walls, the city was laid out with great care. At its centre stood the king's court. From it ran 30 very straight, broad streets, each about 120 feet wide, crossing one another at right angles. Under them ran drains to carry storm water away. Narrower streets branched off the main ones, and down the middle of the big streets grew strips of grass where animals grazed.
The mathematician Ron Eglash, who wrote a book called African Fractals, found something clever in the plan. The same shapes repeat at every size: in the rooms of a house, in the house as a whole, and in the way houses were grouped in a village. Mathematicians call this kind of repeating pattern a fractal. Eglash has said that Europeans who first came to Africa thought such buildings looked disorganised, when the builders may have been using a kind of mathematics Europe had not yet discovered.
Benin also lit its streets at night. Tall metal lamps, many feet high, stood around the city, especially near the palace. They burned palm oil, and their wicks were lit after dark so people could find their way to and from the king's court.
Visitors were amazed. When the Portuguese arrived in 1485, they called it the Great City of Benin. In 1691 a Portuguese captain, Lourenco Pinto, wrote that it was bigger than Lisbon, that its streets ran straight as far as you could see, and that it was so well governed that theft was unknown and people had no doors on their houses.
A Dutch writer of the 1600s, Olfert Dapper, described the houses standing neatly side by side along the streets, with long galleries inside and rooms divided by red clay walls. Rich families rubbed and washed those walls until they shone like mirrors. Every house, he said, had its own well. A family house was split into three: the husband's rooms in the middle, facing the road, the wives' quarters to the left, and the young men's quarters to the right.
The city itself was divided into 11 parts, each a smaller copy of the king's court, full of workshops, homes and public buildings linked by passageways and covered in art. Outside walls carried ridged patterns and clay carvings of animals and warriors. In the palace, pillars were covered with bronze plaques showing the deeds of past kings.
The essay traces the city's decline back to the 15th century, to fighting inside the kingdom that grew as Europeans pushed in and the slave trade spread along its borders. Europeans had come for ivory, palm oil and pepper, and they sold guns in return.
Then, in 1897, British soldiers took the city. They looted it, blew it up and burned it to the ground. Koutonin writes that his own great-grandparents were among the many who fled. They belonged to the king's trusted corps of doctors.
Today a modern Benin City stands on the same plain. But the older, grander city underneath it has not been preserved. There is no model of it, no replica, and the essay complains that the ruins do not even appear in tourist guidebooks. Visitors to Edo State are sometimes shown places that might once have been part of the old city, but the walls and moats themselves are hard to find. Perhaps, Koutonin wonders, a stretch of one of the largest things people have ever built is lying forgotten somewhere in the bush.
One building is thought to be a true survivor: a courtyard house in Obasagbon known as the house of Chief Enogie Aikoriogie, probably built in the second half of the 1800s. It still has the fluted walls, pillars, open central courtyard and carved decoration that visitors once described in the old city.
The essay ends with a bitter twist. If you want to see the glory of old Benin today, it says, you may do better visiting the Benin bronzes in the British Museum in London than walking the streets of the city that made them.
