ARTICLE 4 Olfert Dapper was a Dutch physician and writer who never travelled out of the Netherlands even as his Description of Africa , published in 1668 became, for the next couple of centuries, the go to text for outsiders (ie Europeans, many of whom were potential slave traders, including the emerging mercantile class of ‘gentleman scholar’ common in Europe at the time) seeking to learn of Africa or the kingdoms of Africa. Though he never visited any kingdom in Africa, certainly not West Africa, Olfert Dapper relied heavily on the records of the Dutch West India Company, a trading company that began to ply the West African coastline in the early 1600s and throughout the hotbed period of European slave trade. The period of 1600s, 1700s and all through the early 1800s was not only the most prolific in the trade of Africans by the Europeans, it was also a time when Oba Esigie's ban on the trade of humans was set fully in place in the kingdom of Benin, having been put in placed du