Why it looks like this

Long before colonization, Benin City was the planned capital of the Benin Kingdom: broad straight streets ran out from the Oba's palace, and European visitors in the 1600s compared it favourably to their own cities. Around it lay the Walls of Benin — a vast system of earth banks and ditches, among the largest earthworks ever made by people.

British forces burned the city in 1897 and took its famous bronzes. The modern city grew back around the same centre, its ring and radial roads echoing the old plan, with traces of the earthworks still crossing the suburbs.