From the late 1600s to the early 1900s, the West African kingdom of Dahomey (in present-day Benin) was protected ... before the arrival of Europeans like Portuguese explorer Henry the Navigator ...

Oba Esigie, the King of the Benin Kingdom from 1504 to 1550, made history as the first recorded Nigerian to speak a foreign language. He was said to have mastered Portuguese at a time when few ...

Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Edo people of the Kingdom of Benin, which controlled ... which were traded by the Portuguese; a later style called Birmingham manillas, which ...

Since no kingdom or ... conquered by the Benin Empire in the 16th century. The city became a war camp and a slave trade port, eventually becoming Lagos (named after a Portuguese coastal town).

Because the kingdom lacked a system of writing, historians until very recently had to rely on evidence preserved by the Portuguese traders who dominated the slave traffic with Benin from the 1480s ...

The Edo people established this kingdom in present-day Edo State, and it became a wealthy and powerful entity before the arrival of European explorers. The Obas (rulers) of Benin wielded immense ...