Once upon a time, there lived a rich and powerful woman. So rich and powerful was she, that she reigned over a vast queendom. A vast queendom bigger than the entire Roman Empire. Except that her queendom was nowhere near Rome.
In fact, her kingdom was closer to Lagos, though at that time, Lagos was differently named. The woman’s name was Oloye Bilikisu Sungbo.
She was an noblewoman of the Ijebu people, who was so mighty, she exerted a trade monopoly over the Lagos lagoon, and the West African coastline, and no one could buy or sell, except they paid her tributes and taxes.
Her trade was in gold, ivory, and expensive spices, exotic incenses and rare fragrances.
Oloye Bilikisu Sungbo’s clients included a famous Jewish King to whom she taught wisdom, and who was himself humbled by her immense wealth. From far & wide, several other kings sought for her wisdom, and possibly to woo her.
But none of them was good enough for her.
Oloye Bilikisu Sungbo ruled in a highly organized kingdom, dating over three centuries before many of the earliest documentations of human civilization in the tropical African rainforests.
Today, her queendom can still be located.
It’s just an hour drive from Lagos, and its relics, buildings and walls more than 1,000 years old, dating as far back as 800AD.
Now, 800 AD is a very important era in world history.
It was a time whereas African kingdoms had developed advanced civilizations , even Europe was still a fledgling amalgam of villages, dominated by mostly uneducated warmongers knowns as Barbarians, whose migration from the south of Europe was blocked by other wild eyed savages known as Vikings, who were expanding from Northern Europe. There were no Queens anywhere in Europe then, as women had no rights outside the male-dominated barbarian households.
While there were no advanced civilizations native to Europe in 800AD, there were already black African colonizers who governed there, and who began to introduce education and development to Europeans, from Spain to Greece and beyond.
These were the Moors, from the Greek word Mauros, meaning dark, and they brought with them knowledge, technology, riches and refinement from empires like Songhai, Oyo and Ancient Egypt.
The black Moors taught the Greeks, who later taught the Romans, who later taught the French, Germans and English, who later rewrote history leaving out how it began.
The Moors ruled Europe for more than 700 years, from 711AD to 1492 AD, until religious wars divided and conquered them.
Till today, many Europeans bear names like Moore, Morris and Maurice, as a heritage of a time when their rulers were black, and they aspired to be ‘moor-rish’, or black-like.
Back home in the rainforests of West Africa’s Atlantic coasts, many Moor-ish kingdoms held sway. Oloye Bilikisu Sungbo herself ruled from a large royal palace which had several living quarters, and stadium sized courtyards.
Her queendom is even more intriguing for its vast, walled embankments, which meant she was frequently at war. In fact, Oloye Bilikisu Sungbo was in power during the frequent inter-tribal wars in the Yoruba Kingdom.
The city-wide walls she built became known as Sungbo’s Eredo - a system of rammed-earth defensive walls or embankments built to surround the whole of Ijebu Kingdom in today’s South Western Nigeria. The Ijebu word “Eredo” according to the oral tradition of Sungbo’s Oke-Eri people means a walled embankment or rampart.
Her walls would outlast her lifetime, and several other rulers after her. In fact, they lasted until the central authority of the Oyo Empire began to collapse, and there arose a great war that lasted all of 16 years. While the Ibadan sought to unite several Yoruba nations into an empire to continue the Oyo tradition, the Ekiti people led the Eastern Yoruba into war, to secede from the Western Yoruba, held under Ibadan’s sway.
Long after the time of Sungbo, these revolutionary civil wars peaked from 1789–1880, leading to the destruction of many historic towns and cities, including the formidable embankments that had been built around Ijebu kingdom by Oloye Bilikisu Sungbo.
Many more military bombardments, and later, British colonization, ended the 16-year War of Nations, paving way for a fragile peace that would open up the corridor for the extraction of goods from the Yoruba hinterland to the Atlantic coast, the beginnings of the looting that built today’s European civilizations.
In particular, today’s remnants of Sungbo’s Eredo walls stretch about 21meters high and 10km long.
Scientists and archeologists estimate about 3.5 cubic millions of earth was physically moved to create such a structure. This would have required more than just “slave labor”, as some theories suppose, but unknown technology and in fact, a deliberate whole-of-community effort.
The ruins, now mostly well-preserved mounds of earth in the form of a ditch cutting through the thick rain forest, serve as formidable reminders of an organised kingdom that once existed there.
The Eredo ruins are still located in four places; the best-kept section of the rampart turns up as you approach Ijebu Ode 5 miles from Epe in Eredo village, but there’s more 2 miles outside Shagamu to the west, then 3 miles east of Ife on the Ijebu-Erimo road and then 2 miles to the north of Oru on the road to Ibadan, where the 16 year war was at its most fiery.
As the war ended, Sungbo’s Eredo lay hidden in the nearly impenetrable rain forest, with other possibly more breathtaking secrets.
Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims come to every year to honor Sungbo's grave, at the end of a narrowing road with white walls, near the Eredo walls in her hometown, called Oke-Eri.
A message at the gate welcomes visitors to the seat of ‘Her Royal Majesty, Bilikisun Sungbo’.
Her grave is enclosed by a small gate in front and on the sides by a small fence made with iron bars, punctuated by small cement pillars with Arabic inscriptions on them. Arabic was the most global lingua franca of that time.
The people of Ijebu-Ode revere Bilikisun Sungbo as a goddess, a compassionate woman, and extremely beautiful to behold.
If middle eastern records of her extensive travels are to be taken into account, the writer of the Songs of Solomon, says in chapter 1:4, this woman was “Black and beautiful.”
Interest in Bilikisun Sungbo’s legacy continues to grow, and archaeologists and preservationists have successfully mapped the Eredo wall’s structure. They include anthropologist Professor Akinwumi Ogundiran, and archaeologist, Patrick Darling.
Curiously, more city walls have been discovered all over Nigeria than in all of the rest of West Africa, with other enormous walls such as the ancient Kano walls, and the great walls of Benin kingdom.
Most of these walls were built with sophisticated machines undiscovered by modern science, in an age of global commerce and advanced technologies that predate the European iron age by at least 1000 years, and the modern industrial era even more.
The Eredo kingdom and its walled monument were added to the UNESCO World Heritage sites tentative list in 1995 by the National Commission for Museums and Monuments, which includes other wonders of African civilization such as the Pyramids of Giza in today’s Egypt and the city of Djenne in today’s Mali.
Sources:
Great Walls - https://guardian.ng/life/sungbos-eredo-the-great-wall-of-a-yoruba-kingdom/
Great City - https://www.amplifyafrica.org/amp/eredo-the-ancient-lost-city
When Black Moors ruled Europe - https://theafricanhistory.com/633
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