ARTICLE X
The British Pre and post colonial Propaganda Against the Benin Empire.
FROM JAMES GRAHAM, HISTORIAN :
“European influence in outlining provinces was most influential when coupled with the obstacles against effect communication withing the kingdom such as swamps and jungles.
Therefore the general effect of European slave trade was its reinforcement of the economic self-assertiveness of Benin outlying provinces, with which the European traded.
The slave trade was in no way closely connected with territorial expansion of the empire under Ewuare, Ozolua and Esigie.
If traders came ever less frequently to Gwato it was probably because they were less interested in ivory than in slaves, and there is no indication of any slave raiding activities by Benin's central army.
To assert that the cultural and moral decline of Benin was due to its insulation from external commerce and ideas is to assume that there was such a decline.” - James D Graham, Historian.
2.
๐๐ฅ๐ข๐ ๐ง๐๐ FOREMOST NIGERIAN ๐๐๐ฆ๐ง๐ข๐ฅ๐๐๐ก ๐ฃ๐๐ง๐๐ฅ ๐๐๐๐ ๐ถ๐ป ๐ฎ ๐น๐ฒ๐ฐ๐๐๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐ต๐ฒ๐น๐ฑ ๐ฏ๐ ๐๐ต๐ฒ ๐๐ป๐๐๐ถ๐๐๐๐ฒ ๐ผ๐ณ ๐๐ฒ๐ป๐ถ๐ป ๐ฆ๐๐๐ฑ๐ถ๐ฒ๐:
The second puzzle of Benin history is no less intriguing. It concerns Benin's role in the Atlantic Slave Trade. That evil trade, spanning several centuries, devastated the Western African region. Unlike the Arab Slave Trade from eastern and central Africa, in which Arabs undertook the slave raids directly, the West African Atlantic Slave Trade by European traders relied on African states and African slave raiders for their human victims. Throughout the region, many states embroiled themselves in the slave trade. Asante, Oyo, Dahomey, the Rivers states of eastern Nigeria, were all involved in the evil trade. In the nineteenth century, the Sokoto Caliphate joined this train of West African states that traded on fellow Africans, causing the depopulation of the Benue Valley in this instance (see Dike 1956: 27).
What about Benin and its empire? Clearly, Benin had important trade connections and political ties throughout the region that would have put it in a place of considerable advantage in the competition of the slave trade. How much did Benin press its advantages in pursuit of the Slave Trade? The puzzle is that Benin did not press its advantages to engage in the Slave Trade. Indeed, Benin's role in the Slave Trade was minor. It seems fair to say that Ryder's (1969:198) conclusion on this score has been well accepted by historians. He says: "There is no evidence that Benin ever organized a great slave trading network similar to that which supplied the ports of the eastern delta, or that it ever undertook systematic slave raiding . . . Benin either could not or would not become a slave-trading state on a grand scale" (also see Davidson 1971:65). Don Ohadike, the Anioma historian whose region of western Igbo would have been grievously impacted if Benin had played a large role in the slave trade, concurs with Ryder:
Slavery was neither an economic necessity nor a vital component of the entire political and social life of [Benin] society . . . even after the rise of Benin as a large kingdom, its involvement in slavery was limited. Ryder has demonstrated that Benin's participation in the Atlantic slave trade or the European trade generally was minimal. Ryder's thesis is confirmed by the fact that the Edo political structures were not particularly affected by the European trade as was the case with Dahomey and the Gold Coast (Ohadike 1994: 42; also compare Igbafe 1979: 27).
Benin's policies forbidding any large commitment to the slave trade is a puzzle for two main reasons. First, it makes Benin the sole exception among West African states in their full-scale participation in the European Slave Trade. Second, Benin had a strong institution of slavery in its culture and internal social organization. Benin's abstinence from the evil trade could not fairly be attributed to some humanitarian inhibition on its part. How then does one explain this rare phenomena in African history?
The Caribbean scholar Walter Rodney offers one good clue that will help us to solve this puzzle of Benin history. Rodney argued that many African states craved to refrain from the slave trade but were afraid to do so. They were so weak that the European traders could imperil their power and survival if they failed to participate in the slave trade (see Rodney 1972: 80-82). The reverse logic in Rodney's postulate was that only strong African states could make deliberate decisions to participate in the evil trade or else to refrain from it. Benin was a strong state that could say no to European powers and not be threatened with punishment that would destroy it. Apparently, from the outcome of history, Benin took the calculated decision not to involve itself in the slave trade in the manner of other states and not to encourage slave raids such as those for which the Aro were notorious in the Igbo hinterland in eastern Niger Delta.
But why did the Benin decide not to involve the resources of their kingdom in slave raids and slave trade, as so many other African states did? This is where to bemoan the absence of literacy in the civilizations of Benin and the other areas of tropical Africa. How one wished there were written records to reveal the arguments that were advanced for and against Benin's involvement in the slave trade, with menacing pressures from European traders and rival state organizations all across West Africa to cope with. But no such records exist. However, from its history, we can offer two speculative strands of reasoning for Benin's abstinence in the Slave Trade. First, it was entirely possible that policy makers saw the futility of the slave trade. The payback to the participating African states was miserable. But its disruption in their social structures was horrendous. Such was the fate of Oyo that destroyed its state institutions and civilization from the slave trade and a catastrophic civil war that the slave trade instigated in Oyo. A second reason is that Benin needed growth in its population for the management of its state affairs and for its external imperial engagements during the centuries of the Atlantic Slave Trade. There is always the temptation to believe that a large Empire, such as the one that the Benin managed, was being run by a huge population. But that was not the case. Benin was a nation with a small population who ran a big empire -- just as a small Songhai nation sustained a huge empire in the Western Sudan. Involvement in the slave trade would not help in the battle against population decrease that various Obas of the House of Eweka fought to reverse. The policy of abstinence that resulted on this score of the slave trade accords with the imperatives of Benin history of that time.
Whether these explanations for the absence of Benin from large-scale participation in the slave trade are correct or not, the policy forbidding such involvement paid handsome dividends for Benin. Its social structure and political system did not suffer from the destruction which the slave trade wrought for Dahomey, Asante, Oyo, and a host of other African states in the centuries of the slave trade. Moreover, out of the total area of the West African Atlantic coast impacted by the slave trade, the region of the western lower Niger Delta, in which the Benin Empire held sway, was the least disrupted.” - PROF PETER EKEH
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