Canada’s Role in the Sacking of West Africa’s Benin City
Canada’s Role in the Sacking of West Africa’s Benin City
Once a great metropolis, Benin City is today a forgotten city, destroyed without a trace
by Yves Engler / March 24th, 2016
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 km in all.
Before most other cities Benin City had public lighting. In 1691 Portuguese ship captain Lourenco Pinto wrote that the city was “larger than Lisbon” and “so well governed that theft is unknown.”
Dating to the 11th century, Benin City faced growing pressure from European encroachment and the transatlantic slave trade. Finally, in 1897 a well-armed British force of 1,200 sacked the city, stealing or destroying its wealth. Today one is more likely to find remnants of the Benin City in the British Museum in London than in Nigeria.>
More:
http://dissidentvoice.org/2016/03/canadas-role-in-the-sacking-of-west-africas-benin-city/
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