At first glance, this is not very impressive. When you get there, when you leave a town, you have to look through the dense vegetation to see a ditch, covered here and there with garbage. Just above it is a large laterite embankment: here too its red earth is covered with trees, plants and vines. Here we find ourselves, however, before a part of the largest monument known to date in sub-Saharan Africa, located in the southwest of present-day Nigeria: a defensive enclosure with a circumference of more than 160 kilometers, formed by an embankment and ‘a trench that sometimes reaches up to 20 meters high. It protected the city-state of Ijebu, a contemporary kingdom, among others, of the famous kingdom of Benin, which prospered between the 15th and 19th centuries.
“ You can pass by without even seeing it. »points out the Nigerian archaeologist Joseph Ayodokun, in front of this part of the wall cut by the excavation of a small road. The “Eredo of Sungbo”, as it is called, has almost disappeared under the abundant vegetation that hides it from sight and memory. It has also, like many vestiges of medieval African history, been ignored by research for a long time. Nigeria – a populous, dynamic but chaotic country – is significantly under-resourced. Western researchers have long had no interest in this forest strip in West Africa, between the coast and the savanna, which they saw as a “ desert » civilizational, as described in particular by the historian François-Xavier Fauvelle in his work ancient africa (Belin, 2018).
Contrary to this image, Ijebu (today Ijebu-Ode) was an influential urban centre, which benefited from its strategic location in a multipolar political landscape. “It constituted a kind of barrier for people who came from the interior to trade with the coast, and vice versa”Mr. Ayodokun continues. Long before the arrival of the Portuguese in Lagos, in 1472, spices, kola nuts and palm oil were exchanged there for fabrics or salt, transported mainly through the authentic road that then constituted the Niger River.
precise location
As a reflection of its power, the construction of Eredo, at the beginning of the 15th century, required enormous “quantities of energy and hours of work”underlines the Nigerian archaeologist, affiliated with the University of Ibadan, in southwestern Nigeria. “To carry out a project like this, there had to be a very strong and very determined political power”precise. The earth wall has “ probably » It had the function of both demarcating its territory, controlling access to it and defending it. Probably because it remains largely unknown.
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