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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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).

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 ...

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 ...

The Museum of Fine Arts will close its Benin Kingdom Gallery on April 28, the museum announced Tuesday. The gallery opened in 2013 after the MFA accepted works lent from the collection of Robert Owen ...

Because many of the sculptures had been originally plundered in a bloody British raid in 1897, the MFA subsequently sought a deal to transfer title to the Kingdom of Benin in exchange for a long ...

The royal leader of the Kingdom of Benin sought the return of artifacts displayed at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The collector who owned them took them back instead. By Colin Moynihan and Tom ...

For more than a decade, a collection of masterful works from the West African Kingdom of Benin have held pride of place at the Museum of Fine Arts, in a dedicated gallery just off the museum’s ...