Centuary long lost to time5/28/2023 The upper storeys are made of the same sort of clay. “Adorned with gables and steps … they are usually broad with long galleries inside, especially so in the case of the houses of the nobility, and divided into many rooms which are separated by walls made of red clay, very well erected.”ĭapper adds that wealthy residents kept these walls “as shiny and smooth by washing and rubbing as any wall in Holland can be made with chalk, and they are like mirrors. “Houses are built alongside the streets in good order, the one close to the other,” writes the 17th-century Dutch visitor Olfert Dapper. In the middle of the streets were turf on which animals fed. Many narrower side and intersecting streets extended off them. These main streets, which ran at right angles to each other, had underground drainage made of a sunken impluvium with an outlet to carry away storm water. Photograph: AlamyĪt the centre of the city stood the king’s court, from which extended 30 very straight, broad streets, each about 120-ft wide. It never occurred to them that the Africans might have been using a form of mathematics that they hadn’t even discovered yet.”Ī plaque showing an entrance to the palace of the Oba of Benin. The mathematician Ron Eglash, author of African Fractals – which examines the patterns underpinning architecture, art and design in many parts of Africa – notes that the city and its surrounding villages were purposely laid out to form perfect fractals, with similar shapes repeated in the rooms of each house, and the house itself, and the clusters of houses in the village in mathematically predictable patterns.Īs he puts it: “When Europeans first came to Africa, they considered the architecture very disorganised and thus primitive. In contrast, London at the same time is described by Bruce Holsinger, professor of English at the University of Virginia, as being a city of “thievery, prostitution, murder, bribery and a thriving black market made the medieval city ripe for exploitation by those with a skill for the quick blade or picking a pocket”.īenin City’s planning and design was done according to careful rules of symmetry, proportionality and repetition now known as fractal design. 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 houses are large, especially that of the king, which is richly decorated and has fine columns. In 1691, the Portuguese ship captain Lourenco Pinto observed: “Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon all the streets run straight and as far as the eye can see. Indeed, they classified Benin City as one of the most beautiful and best planned cities in the world. They called it the “Great City of Benin”, at a time when there were hardly any other places in Africa the Europeans acknowledged as a city. When the Portuguese first “discovered” the city in 1485, they were stunned to find this vast kingdom made of hundreds of interlocked cities and villages in the middle of the African jungle. Fuelled by palm oil, their burning wicks were lit at night to provide illumination for traffic to and from the palace. Huge metal lamps, many feet high, were built and placed around the city, especially near the king’s palace. Photograph: The British Museum/Trustees of the British Museumīenin City was also one of the first cities to have a semblance of street lighting. View along a street in the royal quarter of Benin City, 1897.
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