Beforeword: Had you ever heard of the Great Wall of Benin City? Until recently, I hadn’t either. When a friend mentioned it, my curiosity was instantly piqued. Naturally, I did some research. This spoken word poem was born from that journey of learning and reflection.

The Wall They Couldn’t See

They called it a wall—
But it was more
It was science wrapped in soil
It was grit
It was story
A 19,900-mile long ingenuity of a people who carved equations into earth

The Great Wall of Benin City!

Longer than China’s wall
But never longer in textbooks—
because what conquerors don’t understand, they erase

It was the moat—a defense, a design
Dug by Edo hands that understood
symmetry
topography
strategy

The Benin Empire—
One of the oldest, most finely honed states in West Africa
Rising strong since the 11th century
First the Portuguese
Then the British
They saw a city—
Crime-free, clean
Crowned with bronze and carved ivory
A city where honesty lived in the marrow of men
Where streets ran wide like open arms
And governance?
It had a pulse,
steady and wise

Yet …
They looked with blind eyes
Called African brilliance “chaos”
Called African symmetry “primitive”
Because the math we mapped
wasn’t chalked on their boards

They came with fire in their pockets
and hunger in their eyes
Trading for men
And when the loot didn’t come fast enough
They came with cannons

1897
Benin city
A rhythm
A revelation
Burnt to the bone
Stole the art
Stole the gold
Stole the breath

Now …
The Great Wall lies hidden in the Nigerian bushes—
Not gone, but grieving
Not erased, just waiting

Waiting
For tongues to remember
For history to reclaim
For voices to rise like the harmattan red dust and sing:

We were here
We were brilliant
We still are

Because the wall?
The wall was never what they saw
It was what they couldn’t

It was legacy
It was light
It was a people

Afterword: Almost 1,000 Benin bronze artifacts—including statues of birds, a warrior‑king, a cockerel (“Okukor”), and a wooden ancestral head—originally looted during the 1897 plunder, have been symbolically returned to the Oba of Benin in Edo State, their ancestral home!

Part 2: “The Return—The Bronzes Speak: Omowale”

After Afterword: This is the story of a lost medieval city you’ve probably never heard about. Benin City, originally known as Edo, was once the capital of a pre-colonial African empire located in what is now southern Nigeria. The Benin empire was one of the oldest and most highly developed states in west Africa, dating back to the 11th century.

The Guinness Book of Records (1974 edition) described the walls of Benin City and its surrounding kingdom as the world’s largest earthworks carried out prior to the mechanical era. According to estimates by the New Scientist’s Fred Pearce, Benin City’s walls were at one point “four times longer than the Great Wall of China, and consumed a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops”.

Excerpted from The Guardian article: “Story of cities #5: Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace”

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In creative solidarity, Dee