The Ugly Warrior who saw the nymph Agbagbon with his naked eye, the punishment of Oboro-Uku and how the abduction of Adesuwa caused a war… The Esigie ban on the sale of humans was fully effective as early as 1516 for both genders. However in the mid to late 1700s, during the reign of Oba Akengbuda, the kingdom suddenly allowed itself to participate in a trade that Esigie had decreed forbidden. Why? Let us recall firstly that the 1700s was the zenith of the European Slave Trade on the West African coastline and that, for much of the up and coming merchant European class, the sale of Africans was one of the most profitable and colony expanding enterprise. Whereas for the so-called ’Great Benin’ mentioned in pre-1600s texts, in adhering to its beloved king’s century old ban on the trade, experienced rapidly receding boundaries with the advent of slaving European traders stationed all around the outskirts of its fast shrinking empire. Why then did the reclusive kingdom, refusing to join