If you checked out my post 3 Black History Questions You can’t Answer you will know that Black history for me goes waaaaaaay back. It’s great to know about Black American Inventors and Mansa Musa etc. but we have to get more than the fast food version of our past to realize what we are capable of when we share values and are proactive instead of reactive.

With the above said few know that Black folks built a wall that extended around and through the Kingdom of Benin.

The wall was located in Nigeria in the Edo region. Theouter city wall was 9,900 miles and the inner city wall was 9 miles within the city. It was 4 times longer than The Great Wall of Chine. The Guiness book of Records states that it is the largest earth work prior to the mechanical age.

.Europeans arrived and admired the workmanship of the wall but thought the city itself was confusing. This is because an algorithm was used to create the city. This in turn made the city’s layout like a fractal. Something that Europeans did not discover until thousands of years later. This means that the planning of the city involved “careful rules of symmetry, proportionality and repetition,” states Ron Eglash a mathematician. Eglash pointed out 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.” Unfortunately the British destroyed the wall and stole the countries treasure and large amounts of art the people produces.