Benin Empire II: The Rise, The Fall, The Ashes
"Bend the knee. Become our colony, as the others have. Do this - and not one drop of blood need be spilled."
That was the offer the mightiest empire that ever lived laid before my kingdom.
I am the Commander of the Benin Empire.
I have been dead three hundred years.I have come back to tell you what we said in return - and what they did to us when they heard it.
We were a few thousand souls. Behind a wall sixteen thousand kilometres long - longer than the Great Wall of China - raised by our own hands across three centuries.
West. North. East. South. Every kingdom we could see had already knelt to the same empire across the water. We stood alone in the middle of a continent, surrounded.
Then their envoy came to our gate, and laid that offer between us.
Kneel. Become our colony. I have turned my answer over every day of my death. I would not change a single word.
We will meet our ancestors as heroes before we live a single hour as cowards. We bend the knee to God. And we have never yet met the man who could call himself our God.
They did not send their terms again. They sent their armies.
The first blow - to destroy us from within. Betrayal, bought and paid for. It failed.
They sent a general against the wall. He failed.
They sent a second. He failed.
So they sent a third. And this one was clever. This one did not hurl his men at the stone like the others. He sat in the dark, and he watched. Piece by piece, in patience, he began to uncover the thing my ancestors had hidden inside our wall.
He learned it was not one wall - but three.
He learned my ancestors had taken their design from the anthill, and the spacing of the three walls from the spider's web. Walls raised from the living earth itself - the way the ant and the termite raise their own. Every distance exact. Every line parallel. The geometry of the spider, turned to earth and stone. Built to endure, as the ant's megalopolis has endured for thirty-two thousand years - generation upon generation upon generation.
He learned that beneath our kingdom ran another kingdom - the colony. Chambers upon chambers, passages upon passages, dug so deep into the earth that no fire above could ever reach it. A whole world living the way the termite lives.A subterranean metropolis spanning eight thousand square miles.
And at the last, he learned the secret we had killed to keep. He found a way to turn that secret against us - from the inside.
A thing so cunning it should have ended everything that night.
It did not.
What stopped him, I will tell you - when you are ready to hear it.
And so the general of the mightiest army the world had ever assembled did the thing his empire had never once done.
He stood before the other powers of the earth and named us a threat to them all. Not a small kingdom - a danger.
If these few thousand souls are allowed to stand for another century, he told them, every people we have ever conquered will see it. They will grow bold. The world we built together may not survive the seeing.
Join us
And the old world joined the alliance, and sailed for Benin. Every flag that had ever carved up the earth turned toward one small coast - until there was no horizon left. Only ships.
My King climbed to the highest stone we had ever laid. He looked at the gathered world. Then he looked at us.
The world will know that a few men stood tall against the whole earth, and died like Free men. We will meet our ancestors as heroes - not as kneeling cowards. We are Benin. And Benin is us.
Let us introduce them to our wall.
Let us introduce them to the inside of the Earth colony.
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