Once a great metropolis, Benin City is today a forgotten city, destroyed without a trace
Few Canadians are familiar with pre-colonial African cities and even fewer know a Canadian military leader helped sack one of West Africa’s great metropolises.
In the fifth installment of its Story of Cities series the Guardian recently focused on Benin City, the lost capital of an important precolonial state. At its height in the ‘Middle Ages’ Benin City and 500 interconnected settlements were the site of the largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era. The walls built in what’s now southern Nigeria were “four times longer than the Great Wall of China” – 16,000…