Moats and Walls of Benin Kingdom: Legacies unprotected and misused

By Omo S. Uwaifo

FOR me, Chairman of quiescent Benin Moat Foundation (BMF), it’s sad to hear the world talk about the Moats of Benin Kingdom in terms perhaps more flattering than those of the Great Wall of China. They enthuse that it is 16 thousand kilometres long and approximately three and a half metres deep wonder, constructed before the industrial age and the creation of excavation machinery. Yes, Óba Oguóla excavated the outer moat and walls of Benin City in circa 1280, and Óba Ęwuare I, the two inner ones in circa 1440.

Let it be clear, Benin moats and walls are in clusters, across the kingdom up to Esan land. The ones in Benin City central are about twenty-eight kilometres long. Other clusters are in settlements such as Udo, Isi, Urhonigbe and so on, while some lie in farms, fallows and forests across the kingdom. According to late Dr. Patrick Darling, Consultant to BMF while he lived, the people of Benin did not build large settlements without moats and walls to protect them from invaders, whether human or animal since Óba Oguòla.

History tells us that Akpanigiakòn, the troublesome leader of Udo, often raided Benin City for captives. To keep him and killer animals out, Óba Oguòla built the outer moat and walls of Benin City. The structures inhibited Akpanigiakón’s raids, and security of life became the motivation for building moats and walls wherever the people settled in large numbers.

Unfortunately, because the people had no culture of writing, much about how the moats came to be have been left to the oral construct of history. How moat locations were determined, how the workforces were recruited and organized, the tools and how they were engineered and the materials used are all unknown today. So, little do we know of these essential information about the moats, that we can hardly uncover the history of Benin, relevant to those times. How do we uncover what the last seven to nine hundred years hide under the rubble of natural dirt and trash by an unthinking people?

Growing up in Benin City at the junction of Ahorhan and Ekpenede streets, my grandfather’s house where a Baptist school was later built, I still saw the moat in much better condition. In an earlier book, here was what I wrote about it. The moat, the people of Benin Kingdom call it iya, an ochre coral around the wriggly waist of Benin City, the proud home of kings since the Ogiso dynasty.

In March 2008, I led a team of members of the Board of Trustees of Benin Moat Foundation to visit Ómò n’ Óba Erediauwa, Óba of Benin and Grand Patron of the Benin Moat Foundation, at the Ęguae. At a memorable visit, the Ómò n’ Óba said publicly before his Ekhaęmwę that he agreed to be Grand Patron of the Benin Moat Foundation because I had founded the organization.

Map of Great Benin Moats and walls

Elevated by the Ómò n’ Óba’s kind words, and outfitted in sportswear all the way from Lagos, I decided that we should take a tour of parts of the moat that I knew too well from my primary school years, 1941 to 1943 at St. Peter’s CMS School, Lagos Street, Benin City, better known as Uhunmwuigbusi.

With springs in my legs, we arrived and at the sight of the compound, something visceral occurred and I lost strength and the will to live. The CMS had built up the entire space including the games field were we had athletics battles. They encroached on the wall of the moat and had filled the moat to its brim, its walls flattened. All was hazy, but I saw plastic bags of varied colours where the moat had been. Where the road to Reverend W. J. Payne’s residence had stood, I saw smoke billowing from variegated refuse.

We were prevented from going closer to the moat, its wall and their debris. I stood my grounds that I had been a pupil there when the CMS moved the school over to Iya Ero, retaining the compound for church only. The officer backed down. We moved closer, tears in my eyes, but it was not long before I was driven back by the rancid smoky smell. All too much for one day, I had had enough. I returned to the airport for the next flight back to Lagos.

At the next meeting, one of us, Mr. B, said angrily in retrospect that ‘those involved in decimating the moat and walls are ignoble offspring of noble ancestors. In spite of an injunction by Ómò n’ Óba Akenzua II that no structures be built within fifty feet of the moat, a bank had and still has its building almost inside the moat in the precincts of the family land of a prominent Ókhaęmwę, about two hundred metres away from the Eguae. Given such primitivity, Dr. Darling could not call the bluff of the National Museums and Monuments official from a region of Nigeria who, given a choice between the moat and another site presented by his region, denied the moat a world heritage status. Meanwhile, destruction of the Benin Moat and Walls intensified.

‘Yes, where are those to enforce the Óba’s injunction?’

‘No, no, no,’ I interjected. ‘It’s a collective duty of all of us to remind ourselves and others that the injunction subsists and should be respected.’

‘I see! You want me to remind the main destroyers of the moat and walls, ekhaęmwę Óba of an Óba’s injunction against such destructive attitudes, eh?’

‘Yes, a king’s injunction remains valid unless revised by a successor. No doubts at all, preserving the moat and walls, the only visible structures we have had since Óba Oguòla, is more important than any Benin man or woman alive. It sounds funny, but think about it, the world would have forgotten that Benin people exist if the British had not looted and sold their artworks to the world?’

Mr. B continued. ‘I heard you and feel even sadder that we destroyed the moat and walls in our beloved Benin City. There are over sixteen thousand kilometers of them, but the ones in the city are those we all seem to know about. At the last count, we’ve built twenty-three roads across them, filling them up without bridges. And some of those roads were and are absolutely unnecessary.’

BMF’s programme to have the rich sponsor bridges across trunk and important roads are still to be executed. Meanwhile, people found that the walls of the moat were superbly matured lateritic clay soil excellent for traditional buildings, and before you knew it, the walls had disappeared along Ękpęnęde Street and similar places around the city.

‘Very true. But recently, the world started a precipitous and antagonistic change. Neither Benin nor Ędo has an Elon Musk to fund Benin people through the expensive remake that the moat and walls need to return them to pristine conditions. After the abuses, such cost would be humongous. Realistically, what we need is as much of the moat and walls as is practicable.’

A new survey of it is the first step. Wherever we find unbroken lengths of more than two hundred metres of moat and walls we would propose that the appropriate authority acts immediately to turn such places to Government Reserves to protect them from being accessed by speculators. Obviously, poverty of money, ideas and knowledge has done colossal damage to the moat and walls, and we cannot reconstruct the continuous moat and the walls as well as the nine gates to the city as we had it in medieval times. Yet we owe it to humankind to show as much of our history as we can whenever possible.

That sent Mr. B fuming again. He said, ‘Can you imagine what Benin City would have looked like if one hundred metres on either side of the moat and walls had been preserved for natural development? If we allowed natural growth of things such as ebe ęwerę, coco yam leaf look-alike, used during the celebration of Iguę Festival. What a green and beautiful necklace we would have around the nape of the citadel of the arts, Benin City, okpęvbo, the great abode of imperial kings of yore!’

He swooned, smiled and sat down, all smily eyes on him.

Uwaifo is an engineer and cultural historian