This is for you to share with your children first, and then some adults:
Which people built the largest earthworks in the history of the world? Or even: Which country built the world’s largest man-made structure? Better still: Which Continent held the world’s largest man-made structure?
Ask enough people and you will hear options such as The Great Wall of China, the Pyramids of Egypt and the Pyramids of the Aztecs, the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben, the Twin Towers, Dubai’s Burj Dubai (my twelve-year old has read this and corrected me) Khalifa, and even some of the ‘Seven Wonders of the World’.
Until I caught an old edition of the British programme QI (Quite Interesting – hosted by one Stephen Fry, who has been in Kampala), I would have gotten the answer wrong as well.
So I only learnt the truth of this by way of a television programme run by the British (QI is on BBC), yet I am over forty years of age and a student of history.
Nobody told me about this in school – yet I could sing the words of a song about a bridge in London.
To make matters worse, for me, the structure that constitutes the correct answer to the questions above was destroyed very deliberately and decisively by the British Army, in what they recorded was a “punitive expedition”, in 1897.
Are your children paying attention?
The largest man-made structure lengthwise and the largest earthwork in the world was known as ’The Walls of Benin’, and existed in “the defunct Kingdom of Benin, which is present-day Benin City, the capital of present-day Edo, Nigeria.”
The people who built the world’s largest earthwork ever were Nigerians, in Africa, WITHOUT British or Chinese or any other foreign supervision or funding.
Wikipedia has it that “The Walls of Benin were a combination of ramparts and moats, called Iya in the local language, used as a defense of the Kingdom of Benin. It enclosed 2,510 sq. miles (6,500 km²) of community lands. Its length was over 9,900 miles (16,000 km). It was estimated that earliest construction began in 800 and continued into the mid-15th century.”
A Portuguese ship Captain, Lorenzo Pinto, reportedly wrote of Benin in 1674: “Great Benin, where the King resides, is larger than Lisbon; all the streets run straight as far as the eye can see. 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 organised that theft is unknown and people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses.”
Until the British came.
To make the matters worse, Wikipedia continues, “as a result, much of the country’s art, including the Benin Bronzes, were looted and relocated to Britain.”
So: not only were those Africans such good scientists that they had engineers and architects building such walls, they were also so good at art that the British stole their pieces away and burnt down an entire city to destroy all evidence.
The phrase ‘punitive expedition’ made me think of the little history we learnt about Uganda, which I am correcting on my own by gathering up material written by Ugandans as well as by people such as the British missionary Rev. John Roscoe (1861-1932).
Roscoe “compiled from information…obtained at first hand from the natives themselves…,” he wrote in his book ’The Baganda: an Account of their Native Customs and Beliefs’ and reveals a lot about us that boggles the mind of an ‘educated’ idiot like myself.
Nobody in any school I attended ever mentioned this book.
Just like nobody ever told us that ‘explorers’ and ‘historians’ recorded that “Caesarian Section” was being performed in Uganda as far back as 1879 according to travellers such as R.W. Felkin.
“The healer used banana wine to semi-intoxicate the woman and to cleanse his hands and her abdomen prior to surgery. He used a midline incision and applied cautery to minimise haemorrhaging…” reads that report. The same report says, “According to one estimate not a single woman survived cesarean section in Paris (France) between 1787 and 1876…”
There is too much to absorb here, so let’s focus on the ‘Walls of Benin’, for today. Just tell the children about that.
“The Walls of Benin extended for some 9,900 miles (16,000 kilometres) in all, in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries. They cover 2,510 sq. miles (6,500 square kilometres) and were all dug by the Edo people (Nigerians).”
They used up ONE 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,” Wikipedia reports.
This is now information for our children, and our Educationists to adopt and teach to the children.
We need to groom less inferior Ugandans and Africans, in general, and make this information mainstream rather than accidental by way of television and the internet.
We need to teach about Africans who CAN AND DID DO GREAT THINGS.
That’s how we will stop going to foreign capitals to spend money strutting about in foreign-made shorts and shirts, buying foreign suits and ties to wear as “official dress” back home rather than building up what we can do best over here.
Perhaps if we came to realise our true potential, we would have fewer foreign “powers” building our roads, bridges, dams and even dressing us up!
Jambo (Hi)! I'd be happy to hear your thoughts so…say something here?