Transcription
When Portuguese explorers first reached Benin in 1485, they were stunned to find a vast and thriving kingdom made up of hundreds of interlocked cities and villages hidden deep within a West African jungle. They called it the great city of Benin and wrote back to Europe about how they had discovered one of the most beautiful and best-planned cities in the world.
Over 400 years later, after deleterious contact with Europeans and the subsequent slaving of Africans had gutted the kingdom, Great Benin, a pitiable shadow of itself, fell to the voracious British Empire in 1897. But 400 years is a long time, and the following accounts are from those who saw Benin at the beginning of those 20 score years when she was rising and resplendent.
What you're about to hear are accounts from the most obscure of history books. Some are even buried in the vault of the Vatican, like a deposition sent in 1694 by Portuguese ship captain Loreno Pinto back to his surreptitious patrons in Portugal. These were then sent to the Sacra Congregation in Italy by a mysterious Father Montelioni. Pinto's accounts today form part of a secretive archive known as the Sacra Congregation, a collection of documents spanning 1622 to 1982 produced by the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the Holy Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith. These are preserved in the Vatican archive, an anthology known to few and yet monstrous in size, composed of 364 volumes. Only fractions of fractions can be viewed and quoted from by the general public.
Rest assured, the mothballing of such important history is not accidental. The British, the Portuguese, and other colonizing Europeans burned many indigenous libraries across the world. So that many of the world's oldest peoples attempting to piece together their once well-known history are today at the mercy of archives like that of Rome's. But no more. Here are some of what we have discovered.
Ship Captain Loreno Pinto, 1691. Quote, "Great Benin, where the king resides, is larger than Lisbon. All the streets run straight and 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 governed that theft is unknown, and the people live in such security that they have no doors to their houses." Close quote.
As a useful contextual aside, London during the same period was described by English professor Bruce Holinger of the University of Virginia as being a city of, quote, "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."
Ru de Pina, chronicler for the king of Portugal. Quote, "In the year 1486, the land of Benin beyond Mina in the Rios doses scraos was first discovered by Johan Aons Davierro who died there. The first Guinea pepper came to Europe from that land where it grows in great abundance. Samples of it were sent to Flanders and other places, and it was soon popular and selling for a high price. The king of Benin sent an ambassador to King Yao, one of his captains, a negro from a seaport town called Guatto, because he desired to learn more about Europe, whose people were regarded there as an unusual novelty. This ambassador was a man of good speech and natural wisdom. Great feasts were held in his honor, and he was shown many of the fine things of Europe. He returned to his land in one of the king's ships, who gave him on departing a gift of rich clothes for himself and his wife. And through him, he also sent to the king of Benin a rich present of such things he knew the king would like very much. He also sent through the ambassador some holy and Catholic words of advice with a praiseworthy appeal to embrace the faith, rebuking him sternly for their heresies and gross idolatrous and fetish practices which are so common among the negroes of that land." [Music]
Late 16th century anonymous Portuguese sea captain. Quote, "The negroes of Guinea and Benin are very irregular in their eating because they never eat at fixed hours and eat four or five times a day. Their drink is water or palm wine. They have no hair but only some toughs on their heads which do not grow. The rest of their bodies has no hair at all. They live long, even to 100 years, always in good shape and except at certain times of the year when they feel ill, as when they have fever. Then they have themselves bled, and they get well since blood is the major factor in their treatment."
Ship captain of the Dutch West India Company, Durk Rutters, 1623. Quote, "At first the town seems very large. When one enters it, one comes at once into a great broad street which appears to be seven or eight times broader than the Warmoesstraat in Amsterdam. This extends straight out, and when one has walked a quarter of an hour along it, one still does not see the end of the street, but he sees a big tall tree as far from him as the eyes can reach. And some Netherlanders say that the street stretches still so much further. At the gate at which one enters there is a very high bowwork, very thick and strongly made with a very deep broad ditch. This ditch extends a good way, but we do not know whether it extended around the town or not. That gate is a well-made gate made of wood to be shot according to their methods, and watch is always kept there. Outside this gate there is a large suburb. When one is in the big street above mentioned, one sees a great many lanes and streets on both sides, which also extends far and straight, but one cannot see to the end of them on account of their great extent. The houses in this town stand in good order, one close to the other, like houses in Holland. Houses in which well-to-do people such as gentlemen dwell have two or three steps to go up and in front have an ante-court where one may sit dry, which court or gallery is cleaned every morning by their slaves and straw mats spread for sitting on." [Music]
Samuel Blondmart, Dutch merchant and director of the Dutch West India Company as summarized and abridged by Ulfred Dapper, 17th century Dutch physician and geographer. Quote, "The town comprising the Queen's Court is about 5 or 6 mi in circumference or leaving the court outside 3 mi inside its gates. It is protected at one side by a wall 10 ft high made of double stockades of big trees tied to each other by cross beams fastened crosswise and stuffed with red clay solidly put together. This wall only surrounds the town on one side, there being on the other side where there is no wall a morass and close underwood which affords no little protection and strength to the town. The town possesses several gates 8 or 9 ft in height and five in width with doors made of a whole piece of wood hanging or turning on a peg like the peasants' fences here in Holland. The king's court is square and stands at the right-hand side when entering the town by the gate of Guate and is certainly as large as the town of Haarlem and entirely surrounded by a special wall like that which encircles the town. It is divided into many magnificent palaces, houses and apartments of the courtiers and comprises beautiful and long square galleries about as large as the exchange at Amsterdam, but one larger than another, resting on wooden pillars from top to bottom, covered with cast copper on which are engraved the pictures of their war exploits and battles and are kept very clean. Most palaces and the houses of the king are covered with palm leaves instead of square pieces of wood, and every roof is decorated with a small turret ending in a point on which birds are standing, birds cast in copper without spread wings cleverly made after living models. The town has 30 very straight and broad streets. Every one of them about 120 ft wide or as wide as the Heerengracht or Keizersgracht canals in Amsterdam from one row of houses to the other from which branch out many side streets also broad though less so than the main streets. The houses are built alongside the streets in good order, the one close to the other, as here in the country, adorned with gable and steps, and roofs made of palm or banana leaves or leaves from other trees, 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. And they make and keep them as shiny and smooth by washing and rubbing as any wall in Holland made with chalk. And they are like mirrors. The upper stories are made of the same sort of clay. Moreover, every house is provided with a well for the supply of fresh water."
Today, Great Benin is lost to history. In 1897, the paltry vestiges of a once-great city were destroyed by a force of avarice no people anywhere had ever before witnessed. The empire on which the sun never sets, but instead is suspended over like an endless bloody moon, burned the city to the ground, cutting off its treasures—gold, coral, ivorys, woodwork, and brass—to be sold to the highest bidders across the four corners of the earth. Today, in foreign places, some of Benin's stolen artifacts can be viewed by passersby and onlookers. Others are locked away in unknown vaults of the unimaginably rich. But we, we still honor the memory of Benin, the way it once was when its legend was legible and blazing for all to see and its promise was potent. Reminding you not to forget to like and subscribe. From Kush to Compton, this has been Trill Black. [Music] I want you.