Adolo is not the subject of this 1987 article but it is interesting to note how mere mention of him supports the argument we are about to make here. For a nation so enamoured by arriving Europeans, Benin's history with various European nations was one fraught with recurring decisions by various Benin kings to block or ban trade with the Europeans. These objections — as we find with Oba Adolo, father of no other than Oba Ovoranmwen himself — were evermore frequent and to do with the same recurring reasons that Esigie had in that first and early ban a good three centuries back, which was the European nature and choice of what they the European increasingly preferred to trade in: human beings. 

Benin’s decision in banning and withdrawal must and deserves to be seen as a gesture of the refusal (against the contemporaneous norm of what was expected of ‘African Kingdoms’) by the African.


Was the Benin refusal the prevalent attitude of the kingdom or merely intermittent? Was it informed from lack (of not meeting supply) or from conscience? Whatever the case, the running narrative that the kingdom was the kingpin overlord in the grand scheme of European  Trade Slave on the coastline of West African does need some rebuttal. Particularly when the various reigning Obas, we now know for a fact, invariably said NO at some point or the other, with some even blocking all contact outright, as we find with both Ehengbuda and Adolo. 


Ryder and Graham and Ekeh are three historians who have questioned the dominant, British-asserted narrative. But the stereotype remains. Because pinning the transatlantic slave trade on the kingdom of Benin, the internationally recognized sovereign nation of the time, legitimatizes and absolves the European to a nice, comfortable place, even going as far, as we find with Britain, outright lying about the European role in the centuries long sale and capture of fellow human beings. 


What we know for a fact is that precisely because Benin Kingdom was the only legitimate kingdom on the West African coastline that had the power to say No, from Esigie to Ehengbuda to Adolo, the kingdom placed endless bans on the obnoxious matter of the European trade in human beings. The only long reign where there wasn't a ban in place was Ohuan's (1606 -1660) ~ and Ohuan was too nonchalant to remove existing bans, specifically the Esigie ban of 1516! Nor was Ohuan the childless interested in expansion, in fact, he was notoriously disinterested. So then, we are left with Ozolua’s reign, only to find out that while Ozolua’s reign was a period of POWs sold as slaves to the Portuguese, it was an incredibly short reign, a young zestful reign before any mass trade in humans started with the Europeans. Ozolua’s idea was to expand not lose men and most of the hamlets he overcame were eager to come under the umbrella name of ‘Benin’ (it meant little after all to be under that umbrella: no change in language, not even of dialect, only the assigning of a title to represent the Oba).


Even so, the dominant Benin character could hardly support Ozolua’s energy for warring expansion. Ozolua was given a moniker, was summarily murdered by his best soldier who reported back to the palace ranks on the excuse that his men could no longer fight and he had to intervene to save the people from the king’s restlessness. For all his expansionism, Ozolua was instead rewarded with a proverb deriding exactly that, a proverb that today competes with the king’s appellation of ‘Ozolua The Conqueror’.  


Those of us who speak Edo and were the favourites of well-versed elders called ‘opkanike’ (usually women) have listened to stories of how very early on, it dawned on Benin that the ovian (the servant) in Portugal was very different from Benin’s concept of the same term and that, further, these folks could not return home — which rendered the sale therefore of all ‘ovie’oba’ (king’s subjects) as ‘ovian’ to a European an abomination. Meaning that, as early as early 1500s, it was already decided that people being sold as ‘ovian’ to Europe was a crime against ’ovie’oba’. Ovie’oba may go to Portugal, but not sold as ‘ovian’.


The meaning of ovie’oba is not the same as ‘king’s slave’ as the English willfully translated it. To be ovie of something is to be the progeny of the thing. Ovie’Edo means ‘children of Edo’. Ovie’oba was literally ‘children of the king’. The question then is how far spread are the groups considered king’s subjects AKA ‘ovie’oba? 


The next critical question is, did the Benins really have overriding absolute power over outlying areas outside the areas demarcated as ‘ovie’ba’? We know the answer to this latter question and it is simply No. Even a place as close as the Jekiris areas (todays Warri, for example) though vassals of Benin was out of the control of Benin andthough one originally created by a prince from Benin Kingdom, with its own fully independent monarchy. Warri or the Jekiris were also morbid sellers of themselves and their neighbours, the Urhobhos. PS: the Urhobhos actually fall into Edoid groups that one would call ovie’ba, so we may in fact have a picture of a rather loose-knit i.e. not exclusive to Edo-speaking, rather Edo-originated, widely spread ‘ovie’oba’. 


Who then would the kingdom have sold as per the dominant accusation, when the idea of trade in ‘ovie’oba’ was, as early as 1516, according to Esigie’s decree, an abomination to the ancestors? 


The transatlantic slave trade started from the discovery of the Americas. By the early 1600s, European forces had a well established and mighty foot soldier network of people carriers, and the mass sale across West Africa of the captured and the sold became a running, multinational trade, setting in the utter and complete commodification of the African in the eyes of slaver kingdoms from Europe. Gone was the matter of princely diplomacy between the kingdom and Portugal in the years between the late 1400 to early 1500s. New players had arrived and they had a full half century from mid 1500s to establish a long slew of fully armed ports across the long straggling West African coastline as never before seen. All over the coastal edges that were west and south of the ever-withdrawing, self-isolating Benin Kingdom, ports teemed and flourished were previously none had been. 


Diametrical to all that ‘busyness’ of trade in the captured and the sold is the significant historical fact that 1600s was for Benin the insular century of Ohuan’s reign since his reign lasted just over half of that century. As mentioned earlier, Ohuan was thoroughly disinterested in empire expansion, inward looking and unconcerned with the Ewuare the Ogidigan’s ‘empire’ project. He could not have children, was singularly inward and insufferably long reigning.


Whether from indifference or lack of eligible people, Ohuan could not be bothered to participate in the obnoxious trade the Europeans were hankering after, and the kingdom receded further and further away. Meaning, for a good half century there was no war for POWs. Even as Benin was not one to see POWs as objects, rather new citizens to be made. No record of oral history or some other record exist to indicates that even during Ozolua’s (by the way, very short!) reign resulted in mass trade of humans. 


All of which reveals to us that Benin was largely absent. 


Before Ohuan’s indifference is the completely ignored element of Esigie’s conscience. Indeed, the strange, hardly ever mentioned matter of ‘conscience’ around this issue. It is hard of course for many to think of the African of the time as having ‘conscience’, but let’s be bold and consider just for a moment that it was at all possible some of them did have the strength of character too easily attributed the European and denied the African. 


Whether it was by Esigie’s conscience or Ohuan’s indifference, the fact is that Benin withdrew from the transatlantic slave trade even before it started as what it became. That is a fact of history that should not be denied Benin. 


Yet, the modern and contemporary Benins in wanting to seem mighty, have allowed the abuse and false accusation of Benin Kingdom’s supposed role in ‘full throttle European Slave Trade’. 


It is nothing but an absurd conceit that the Benins are so unconcerned or will not admit the truth of Benin Kingdom’s powerless hold over surrounding slave-trading ‘vassal kingdoms’ of the delta and even west, in a place like Badagry, which was not exactly the 'Eko' of Benin Kingdom. 


The modern and contemporary Benins would rather they are falsely accused of being overlords to smaller kingdoms whose ‘kings’ were, in many cases, overnight appointees set up by the British in ‘king-making’ sprees designed to serve the British in slave-trading. When the truth is that "Great Benin" was nowhere in that swampy picture of cruel carrying-ons, that Benin simply had no overriding ‘power’ over these supposed ‘vassal kingdoms’ of areas that became known as the Niger-Delta, South West and so one, certainly not over many of the delta and riverine ‘overnight kingdoms’ that were created by the British — areas that teemed about the port at ‘Bonny’, a port that played a fantastically inhumane role of British slavers and their African henchmen. 


The truth was and still is that Benin had no guns and the European slaver did not only have guns but as well multitudes of both local and migrant ‘henchmen’ hardy for smuggling raids and deft at bargaining rounds and at whopping the captured across terrains. The lack of evidence of arms inspired the British need to jump up the ‘juju’ charge against Benin, propaganda that the British were so good at selling through books and pamphlets written by family members of the looters of the very 1897 war that ushered in colonization. 


So there. We began the colonial country that would become known as ‘Nigeria’ with the manufactured lie that people far flung and unhindered by Benin had somehow been freed of the juju meted out by Benin. This was basically  a running claim in the British colonization project on our lands. It became the British running lies even about the European Slave Trade, which was that the latter was rather a case of juju of which they, the Brits, as saviours, had been sent to free the natives and not an international European trade of which they were its most adept and prolific masters. 


There is a distinction between Benin the Empire and Benin the kingdom and much accusations have for far too long been laid on the Edo Benin over the edges of empire of which the English set about creating appointee, overnight 'kings' to facilitate their obnoxious trade. The Edo Benins has had to bear, even believe of themselves the lies and propaganda and all that has had its impact. The incredible thing of course is that despite the obfuscation and the lies, the Edo race know who they are, and who is trying to wipe them out. That they are favoured by the very thing used against them: their CONTINUITY (which we have earlier addressed in another post). 


The signs of what they have to do in preservation have not always been clear, but it has always been through Benin the kingdom, in its aboriginal origin as Idu Igodomidodo. However which way it is written in the romanized alphabet across the ages, whether Idu, Ado, Ido, Oedo, Edo, it is the same Edo the language, kingdom and people. 


The Benin story is a story which we are here saying is one of a long history of the REFUSAL, of an ‘empire’ with no real centralized nor absolute control on activities in the vast domain under the umbrella of its name, ‘Benin’. 


— Architecture Of Unforgetting



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IMAGE:  "Among the hundreds of ivories appropriated trom the compounds of Benin City in 1897, the carved tusks com missioned by Oba Ovonramwen for his ancestral altars can be identified with confidence. This might be expected, because these ivories were relatively new and showed little wear when they arrived in Europe. Moreover several British government officials and traders had visited the city between 1888 and 1896, and provided written and visual information about them. In contrast, there is some confusion about the ivories commissioner by Oba Eweka lI, who succeeded his exiled father in 1914 after a seventeen-year interregnum. Every aspect of Eweka's reestablishment of court traditions was under considerable scrutiny from the colonial government, and Benin's ivory carving had won the admiration or European col lectors and scholars. Nevertheless, few records are extant... 


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