The Great African Kingdom they will never teach you in school about. _ The truth is the African continent was already civilized. People lived peacefully with little crime because it was better governed than much of Europe at the time. Many of these records were written by the Portuguese. Though some parts of Africa were not exposed to the same civilization as others, empires and great kingdoms arose in the north, east, west and south. Hundreds of stone ruins, some 300–500, still exist across Africa, especially in the south. Mining and trading routes linked kingdoms. Weapons were crafted. Empires such as Borno and several Hausa kingdoms, among others in west and northern Africa, used horse chariots and war dress. In eastern Africa, present-day Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, kingdoms traded spices, gold and salt with Asia, especially India, along the coast. In what is now Somalia, people built storey houses of four and five floors, as recorded by Arab scholars. Deep in the West African forest was a kingdom so ordered and beautiful that foreigners called it Great: the Benin Kingdom, now in Edo State, Nigeria. Portuguese and other Europeans who reached it by trade called it Great Benin. The Benin Empire was one of the oldest and most highly developed states in West Africa, dating to the 11th century. The Guinness Book of Records (1974) described the walls of Benin City and its kingdom as the world’s largest earthworks before the mechanical era. Fred Pearce of New Scientist estimated that at one point Benin City’s walls were four times longer than the Great Wall of China and used a hundred times more material than the Great Pyramid of Cheops. On a plain, Benin City was enclosed by massive walls to the south and deep ditches to the north. Beyond them, further walls divided the surroundings into about 500 villages. Pearce wrote that these walls extended some 16,000 km in a mosaic of more than 500 interconnected settlement boundaries, covering 6,500 sq km, all dug by the Edo people. They took an estimated 150 million hours to build and are perhaps the largest single archaeological phenomenon on the planet. Barely any trace of these walls remains, due to plundering and destruction by the British army and its African allies. Benin City was also among the first cities with a form of street lighting. Huge metal lamps, many feet high, stood around the city, especially near the king’s palace. Fuelled by palm oil, their wicks were lit at night to light traffic to and from the palace. When the Portuguese first came in 1485, they were stunned to find this vast kingdom of hundreds of interlocked cities and villages in the African jungle. They called it the Great City of Benin and ranked it among the most beautiful and best-planned cities in the world. In 1691 the Portuguese 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. 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.” By contrast, London at the same time is described by Bruce Holsinger, professor of English at the University of Virginia, as a city of thievery, prostitution, murder, bribery and a thriving black market, ripe for exploitation by those skilled with a quick blade or at picking pockets.