TAO11:


Why are you lying na?

Scholars already documented in the same article you're attaching oo that:

"Towards the end of the seventeenth century, a number of European observers noted that the Edo Kingdom of Benin had been racked for some years by civi war. One of the longest accounts, that of David van Nyendael, reported that as a result of this civil war, Benin City had been sacked and in his day ("1699 -1701" ) was reduced to a 'mere village'. Apparently beginning shortly before 1690, the civil war stretched on well into the eighteenth century."

Paula Ben-Amos Girshick and John Thornton, "Civil War in the Kingdom of Benin, 1689-1721: Continuity or Political Change?", Journal of African History, 42 (2001), pp.353-354.

TAO11:




Thank God you just admitted to have lied when you once boldly suggested that Benin is older than Ife.

I'm glad you just ate it back that there is no such result from Benin.

Moreover, the earlier an establishment of a group of people, the more the productive capacity of the group as compared to new comers.

Having said that, the dating result from Ife to at least 4th century BC specifically mentions that "many settlements" were already established in Ife at the time.

So, now remove the village picture that clogged your mind about Ife at that early date, and stamp it on Benin at that early date. Good boy!


Now regarding your merry-go-round imaginations, name me one fairy tale civilization and functioning society in Benin at any date (with evidence oo --- not audio like your lie about Guinness World Records ), that has not being achieved by Ife centuries before.

Let's go!

Anyone how you spin it, Benin is baby. I'm waiting!!

samuk:


[s]Your continuous engagement with Davidnazee is causing eastern Yoruba, the Ekiti and Akure people a great disservice, I don't think you are from this area.

How do you want the people from this area to feel with all these revelations.

These are probably part of their history they would have loved to forget.

Other tribes are also reading all these revelations of decimation.

All you can counter with is the rebellion of few Benin chiefs that were defeated.[/s]

gregyboy:


Did you forget benin had street light around the palace ans inner towns at night

TAO11:


A few Benin chiefs that rendered Benin kingdom deaolate, sacked and into a mere village?? Wehdone sir!

Moreover, if you all want to talj about wins:

Then I have shown how Owo dealt gave Benin a bloody nose once in the the 1500s (I think) in the clash when Iken ---- the top most Benin military commander lost his life.

I have shown how Benin was dealt with a second time during the reign of Olowo Osogboye outside the village of Ute.

I have shown how Otun-Ekiti dealt with Benin causing a number of Benin commanders to be slaughtered, which then force Benin to initiate a peace-pact.

In the final analysis in the light of these considerations and others, such imagined absolute control which you all have been deluded with by your edo-websites is only audio.

What seem to be ore realistic in that axis is the picture of a Benin which is powerful no doubt but which still faces some tough time and resistance from those it may seek to dominate in that axis.


It is thjs reality f the real world I have been baptizing you all into out from the world of fantastic delusion that have been painted for i Benin moonlight tales from a very early age.

TAO11:


Gosh!!! No "street light" c'mon.

It was Dapper that said all those nonsense that you all get excited about and which your edo websites regurgitated into your heads.

Guys, it's for you to live in tge real-world.

Dapper never left his home country of Netherlands till he left this world.

What a pity!?

samuk:


Your account seems to be the audio here while the submissions of Davidnazee are the accounts of Yoruba writers themselves.

samuk:


Dapper quoted the works of other European who visited Benin the way you have been quoting your 1969 Ife discovery of some stones and dirt.

TAO11:


He showed how Benin won battles along the axis where it seeks to exercise influence.

And I showed how those individually smaller kingdoms too one some occassion disgraced the bigger Benin.

What's so difficult to get here if there is no strong delusions at work.

Haaa! Oranmiyan, na God go judge you oo /s For almost 1000 years, it's still very potent.

samuk:


[s]Benin were doing their destruction from the east while the Fulani were doing theirs from the North, believe me, I get all the angers.[/s]

davidnazee:

[s]Just like ur present Ooni is a serial divorcee.. A man that cant keep a woman.
What kind of Ooni is that?[/s]

TAO11:


Cite me one European work which Dapper quotes from, which says some of those nonsense that he says.

So we can check the work directly, otherwise your fantastic Benin world falls back to oral tradition.

TAO11:


Cite me one European work which Dapper quotes from, which says some of those nonsense that he says.

So we can check the work directly, otherwise your fantastic Benin world falls back to oral tradition.

davidnazee:



It’s ur jealousy for Benin that makes u disregard the work of Dapper. Dapper was informed by Europeans who actually visited Benin and lived there. Scholars accept Dapper’s work as accurate.

TAO11:


That's the point:

(1) Dapper was not an eyewitness.

(2) And he collected his not from records of eyewitnesses.

(3) It all falls back therefore to oral tradition.

SilverSniper:


Dapper's work has been analyzed extensively by the historian Adam Jones. Jones actually published an annotated English translation of the section of Dapper's book that discusses Benin and in the introduction he discusses Dapper's sources.

Adam Jones - Olfert Dapper's Description of Benin (1998)

https://books.google.com/books?id=qW5jNAAACAAJ&dq=inauthor:%22Olfert+Dapper%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjv4b3N3OboAhXFJzQIHWWGDPMQ6AEwAnoECAAQAQ

Also, Jones published a translation of a mid-seventeenth century Dutch manuscript that Dapper drew upon for some of his information on Benin in 1995.

Adam Jones - West Africa in the mid-seventeenth century: an anonymous Dutch manuscript (1995)

https://books.google.com/books?id=KR8uAQAAIAAJ&q=bibliogroup:%22African+historical+sources%22&dq=bibliogroup:%22African+historical+sources%22&hl=en&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiC3oTv3OboAhUUNn0KHaGzBB44ChDoATACegQIABAC

In the footnotes to his translation of the manuscript he notes that multiple statements about Benin from that earlier manuscript were copied by Dapper and incorporated in his book in the section where he discusses Benin.

davidnazee:

Wow, So u can’t read or can’t comprehend simple English?

Dapper collected written accounts of eye witnesses.. some of these eye witnesses also published their own accounts of Benin as they saw it during their visits and stay... how can u call that oral tradition?

TAO11:


The specific contention I have with his work is his grandiose descriptions -- I'm not necessarily saying he is wrong if he says things like Benin has a king, etc.

Long before Adam Jones (1995), notice what is aid about his grandiose descriptions:

In the seventeenth century, the admirable Dapper gave his contemporaries a glowing account of the greatness of the King of Benin, of his capital surrounded by a high wall over which the approaching travelers saw many towers and spires, and of his army a hundred thousand strong, including numerous horsemen. Nyendale, the Dutchman, who visited Benin City in the opening year of the eighteenth century, gives details of the place which it is difficult to reconcile with the account of more recent travelers who could find no trace of those magnificent streets "prodigious long and broad" of which the Dutchman tells us, although some allowance must be made for the different standards which a couple of centuries ago were applied in such matters. In quite recent times Europeans have occasionally penetrated to the Benin capitals, traders for the most part, or more rarely officials of the Niger Coast Protectorate, such as were the victims of the recent massacre.
But, from what we do know of Benin and its people, it can scarcely be described as a desirable place of residence.

Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, Volume 83 (Jan 1897), pp 81-82.

Those are the specific aspects of his accounts I noted were grandiose and unrealistic. He obviously wouldn't misrepresented every basic detail.

SilverSniper:


The problem with this argument is that the person who authored that paragraph (in 1897) in that weekly newspaper that you have cited, had absolutely no idea, in 1897, about the numerous other contemporary corroborating accounts from eyewitnesses that strongly affirm Dapper's account about the "the greatness of the King of Benin, of his capital". Apart from the fact that Derick Ruiters' earlier eyewitness account (published in 1602 in a book about west Africa by Pieter de Marees) of the streets, the palace, and other aspects of Benin line up perfectly with aspects of Dapper's later account, there is also the fact that the accounts of both a Spanish priest (cited and translated in the appendix of Alan Ryder's 1969 book about Benin) who visited Benin, and the testimony of a later Portuguese ship captain (Lourenço Pinto) who visited Benin (1693) also strongly affirm and agree with multiple aspects of Dapper's account. Actually, the article you keep referring to by Paula Ben-Amos Girshick and John Thornton, is very explicit, on p. 358, about the fact that multiple people from different countries who did actually visit Benin saw pretty much the same kinds of things that Dapper described.

You know that van Nyendael's account describing a capital city wrecked by civil war, in a period when the state which has suffered a severe temporary defeat by the rebel army (led by the former commander of the royal army and his forces), is not going to be a positive account, so I am not sure how the writer's allusion to van Nyendael's account about a temporary situation is somehow proof that the many other earlier accounts are wrong. In any case, after the civil war was resolved in the 1720s, later French visitors to Benin in the late 1700s, such as J.F. Landolphe, or Pierre Labarthe did find a large capital city and a large army there and wrote about it; the article by Ben-Amos Girshick and Thornton even cites Labarthe at the end.

What I will agree with is that numbers such as "100,000" (or more) in historical accounts of pre-modern (pre-modern meaning something like before the last few centuries, the exact cut-off dates for what separates "modern" from "medieval" and "ancient" are often arbitrary) armies in both European or Arabic sources of any state, except in certain special cases, are often exaggerations. But the meaning that historians usually take from such descriptions, when other aspects of such descriptions are credible, is that the people giving such accounts are trying to describe a state with a very large army, lots of power, etc. If you object to "100,000" or similarly large numbers being taken literally, that is fine, although that objection should apply consistently to all the powerful states in the west African region that were described as having such numbers of soldiers by outside visitors. I don't think historians focus too much on the specific number when talking about total army sizes (rather than the numbers of soldiers present at specific battles, which is a different thing) of a state in those older historical accounts so much as the meaning the account was trying to convey about the power of the state.

davidnazee:


Thank you for this very informative piece.
However I don’t agree that the figure of 100,000 was an exaggeration.. the description says that the Oba of Benin had a standing army of about 20,000 and if the need arises (if there was a big war) he can raise an army of 100,000.. I believe an empire as large as Benin (just like other great empires) can actually raise an army of 100,000 fighters if need be.

SilverSniper:


The problem with this argument is that the person who authored that paragraph (in 1897) in that weekly newspaper that you have cited, had absolutely no idea, in 1897, about the numerous other contemporary corroborating accounts from eyewitnesses that strongly affirm Dapper's account about the "the greatness of the King of Benin, of his capital". Apart from the fact that Derick Ruiters' earlier eyewitness account (published in 1602 in a book about west Africa by Pieter de Marees) of the streets, the palace, and other aspects of Benin line up perfectly with aspects of Dapper's later account, there is also the fact that the accounts of both a Spanish priest (cited and translated in the appendix of Alan Ryder's 1969 book about Benin) who visited Benin, and the testimony of a later Portuguese ship captain (Lourenço Pinto) who visited Benin (1693) also strongly affirm and agree with multiple aspects of Dapper's account. Actually, the article you keep referring to by Paula Ben-Amos Girshick and John Thornton, is very explicit, on p. 358, about the fact that multiple people from different countries who did actually visit Benin saw pretty much the same kinds of things that Dapper described.

You know that van Nyendael's account describing a capital city wrecked by civil war, in a period when the state has suffered a severe temporary defeat by the rebel army (led by the former commander of the royal army and his forces), is not going to be a positive account, so I am not sure how the writer's allusion to van Nyendael's account about a temporary situation is somehow proof that the many other earlier accounts are wrong. In any case, after the civil war was resolved in the 1720s, later French visitors to Benin in the late 1700s, such as J.F. Landolphe, or Pierre Labarthe did find a large capital city and a large army there and wrote about it; the article by Ben-Amos Girshick and Thornton even cites Labarthe at the end.

What I will agree with is that numbers such as "100,000" (or more) in historical accounts of pre-modern (pre-modern meaning something like before the last few centuries, the exact cut-off dates for what separates "modern" from "medieval" and "ancient" are often arbitrary) armies in both European or Arabic sources of any state, except in certain special cases, are often exaggerations. But the meaning that historians usually take from such descriptions, when other aspects of such descriptions are credible, is that the people giving such accounts are trying to describe a state with a very large army, lots of power, etc. If you object to "100,000" or similarly large numbers being taken literally, that is fine, although that objection should apply consistently to all the powerful states in the west African region that were described as having such numbers of soldiers by outside visitors. I don't think historians focus too much on the specific number when talking about total army sizes (rather than the numbers of soldiers present at specific battles, which is a different thing) of a state in those older historical accounts so much as the meaning the account was trying to convey about the power of the state.

The mention of "more recent travelers" not finding the same grandeur or magnificence of visitors of earlier centuries is not an argument against the validity of the accounts of earlier centuries, since Benin's power had declined in those times (mid to late 19th century) due to internal conflicts, and apparently, changes in trade. European visitors to Oyo in the early 19th century did not find the same kind of power or prosperity there that had existed in earlier centuries but this does not mean the earlier accounts about Oyo were false in that case either.

TAO11:


You seem to have missed what my specific contention in Dapper's description was, or you chose to avoid it altogether.

Notice that I have highlighted certain aspects of your comment here in bold just to draw your attention to the strawman.

You've argued that certain earlier eyewitness accounts align "pretty much" with aspects of Dapper's remote account.

Yes, if you had paid a closer attention to my foregoing reply, then you would have noticed that certain aspects of Dapper's accounts (such as the greatness of Benin's king and capital, a beautiful palace, amongst other relatively vague and general attributes) are already implied therein to be true and obvious. These are the obvious standard and expection of any dominant kingdom at the time.

My specific contention in relation to which I brought up Dapper (if you care to trace back my comment in that regard) are some specific grandiose descriptions such as "street lights" (as already mentioned on this thread), "shiny walls", etc. --- we've all heard different kinds of these exaggerations at different times.

Now, having zoomed in even more closely on my contentions, can you now direct me to an earlier eyewitness account than Dapper's --- from which Dapper's may have derived --- which contains some or more of these specifics??

And if yes, please quote me the words with detailed refencing. Thanks!

Cheers!

davidnazee:
.

TAO11:
You seem to have missed what my specific contention in Dapper's description was, or you chose to avoid it altogether.

Notice that I have highlighted certain aspects of your comment here in bold just to draw your attention to the strawman.

You've argued that certain earlier eyewitness accounts align "pretty much" with aspects of Dapper's remote account.

Yes, if you had paid a closer attention to my foregoing reply, then you would have noticed that certain aspects of Dapper's accounts (such as the greatness of Benin's king and capital, a beautiful palace, amongst other relatively vague and general attributes) are already implied therein to be true and obvious. These are the obvious standard and expection of any dominant kingdom at the time.

My specific contention in relation to which I brought up Dapper (if you care to trace back my comment in that regard) are some specific grandiose descriptions such as "street lights" (as already mentioned on this thread), "shiny walls", etc. --- we've all heard different kinds of these exaggerations at different times.

Now, having zoomed in even more closely on my contentions, can you now direct me to an earlier eyewitness account than Dapper's --- from which Dapper's may have derived --- which contains some or more of these specifics??

And if yes, please quote me the words with detailed refencing. Thanks!

Cheers!

TAO11:
SilverSniper if you could please email me a copy of Ryder(1969) I will appreciate. I've been looking for it, and I noticed you mentioned it somewhere in one of your comments. Thanks!

Please send it to TAO.11@yahoo.com

TAO11:


Nothing of the kinds I requested is in your attachment.

That's perhaps why you didn't bother highlighting anything, or quote statements.

In sum, your attachment contains same general things that I know (and that is expected) about other great kingdoms.

You've changed for the better. You started reading too. Thanks to yours truly! Keep it civil, professional and academic like this, you wil enjoy it.

Cheers!

SilverSniper if you could please email me a copy of Ryder(1969) I will appreciate. I've been looking for it, and I noticed you mentioned it somewhere in one of your comments. Thanks!

Please send it to TAO.11@yahoo.com

SilverSniper:


Ryder's book Benin and the Europeans (1969) is a book of about 370 pages, and it has not been digitized. I have a physical copy of the book; I do not have it in digital format and I do not think anyone does, yet. You can probably obtain it from a university library - I am certain that several university libraries in Nigeria, and outside of Nigeria, would have the book (you can use the worldcat.org site to look it up to find the closest library that has it).

SilverSniper:


As I said above, Dapper did not mention street lights. If there is some suggestion that he did, it is incorrect. He does not claim they had street lights in his account. Tall metal lamps placed at fixed positions in compounds and at a specific place in a square in the city are mentioned in mid and late 19th century British accounts, but nothing about "street lights" is in Dapper's account.

The newspaper you quoted was not criticizing there being an absence of street lights in the Benin City of the late 19th century, but just disputing the general picture conveyed by Dapper. That person writing in 1897 would have had no expectation that there would have been such things (street lights) on the basis of anything Dapper wrote, because Dapper did not mention street lights.

The "shiny walls" refer to earthen walls polished to a high degree so that they had a lustrous appearance. This appearance of the walls of the buildings in the capital are mentioned in the 1651 eye witness description of a Spanish priest, translated by Ryder and included as an appendix to his 1969 book on Benin. In that account, in Ryder's translation (p. 313 of Benin and the Europeans) the priest states that the walls of the houses are made of red clay and are "so smooth that they seem to be painted or polished". Later accounts by British visitors give a similar impression. James Fawckner, a British ship captain who visited Benin described a polished earthen bench he saw in a compound in Benin as looking "like marble":

"In the centre is a bench formed of brown clay, which, by frequent rubbing with a piece of cocoa-nut shell and wet cloths, has received a polish, and when dry looks like marble." - Narrative of Captain James Fawckner's Travels on the Coast of Benin, West Africa (1837), p. 33

Another mention of this specific kind of polishing of earthen architecture is this statement by Alan Maxwell Boisragon, one of the survivors of the "Benin massacre", who described a building in Ughoton in a similar manner:

"The chief of Gwatto's house, where we slept that night, was very much superior, the walls, which were very thick, being polished till they were nearly as smooth and shiny as glass." - Alan Boisragon, The Benin Massacre (1897), p. 81

Alan Boisragon was not writing a "positive' or "grandiose" account of the Benin kingdom, obviously, but was actually critical of it and could not be accused of trying to engage in exaggerated praise of Benin, for obvious reasons. He did not like Benin or its people - he was nearly killed by them afterall. There is nothing about mentioning shiny walls that makes a description grandiose. There was a traditional technique to polish earthen walls in certain parts of southern Nigeria to a very great degree in order give them a lustrous, aesthetically appealing appearance and the perception by some Europeans of Benin's particular application of such a technique to buildings in the kingdom was that it made the walls "shine".

davidnazee:

Started reading indeed lol...
anyways my attachment contains a description of Benin city by different European visitors to benin who compared it to their cities in Europe.

TAO11:


Gosh!!! No "street light" c'mon.

It was Dapper that said all those nonsense that you all get excited about and which your edo websites regurgitated into your heads.

Guys, it's time for you all to stary living in the real-world.

Olfert Dapper never left his home country of Netherlands till he left this world.

What a pity!?

gregyboy:
.

[s]Nonsense

All i see is hate


I see you have so studied benin historian and even thier historians that you now know who never left his home


You know i dont adore mere claims you have to go further to covince me on this if not you need slap


TAO11 you have a benin pyscho syndrome [/b]i was the first to notice it before my colleagues bagan to see it too,


We conqured lagos nigga wont agree you will twist it twist it so the conquering we now be looking like migration

This is what beyond obsession you need rehabilitation

As soon as you notice no connection btw benin and ife you bagan to pant and you began to also disagree there must be a connection

[b]Pyschological obsession[/s]

TAO11:


Thanks for admitting that your attachment answers nothing of my questions

Furthermore, the Europeans' comparison (in whatever light), of their newly arrived tour destination, with their homeland from which they've just departed is about the most natural thing to do.

I am not only schocked that you think such comparison is what makes Benin great, I am also shocked that you that you assume such comparison is unique to Benin.

No, that's a trio of inferiority complex, delusions of grandeur, and pure ignorance there, davidnazee. You should do better than that.

Having said that, I assume you love to know if the "white man" has any "great" thing to say about Yorubaland in those early centuries.

I will provide you with some astonishing "white man's" (lol) eye-witness testimonies of great telltale about Yoruba land.

Telltales which will not only highlight Yorubas magnificence; which will not only compare scenes in Yorubaland with parts of Europe; but which will infact indicates to you how transcendent certain aspects of Yoruba socio-political organization is over and above what is obtainable anywhere in Africa, and anywhere in Europe at the time.

Remind me much later today to provide the quotes and references. I have to leave now, I'm way way past bed time.

Cheers!