A Popular History of Benin: The Rise and Fall of a Mighty Forest Kingdom

The history of the former Kingdom of Benin is a fascinating subject which aroused the interest of many scholars during more than one hundred years. However, today, when Africa unfortunately attracts much less public and professional interest than in the times of de-colonisation and subsequent cold war «struggle for the continent» between the socialist and capitalist blocs, only a few specialists outside Nigeria are undertaking Benin researches and, therefore, the authors felt the need to make a new attempt for writing a history of this remarkable kingdom, including newest results of researches. Besides the general public, the book is destined for graduate and undergraduate students, as well as lecturers on African studies. To make easier reading for the general public, the book contains some elements of what may be called «popular history».

The Authors: Peter M. Roese was born in 1944 in Erlangen, Germany, and started a career in a technical profession. He is widely travelled and took always a keen interest in historical subjects. Those activities finally led him to Nigeria where he stayed for three years. During privately organised field-work there, undertaken to discover the so-called «Benin Walls», he collected a lot of information from local people, covering historical, ethnological and anthropological subjects. Those activities finally led to more than thirty publications on the former Kingdom of Benin.
Dmitri M. Bondarenko was born in 1968 in Moscow, Russia. He studied history and anthropology at the famous Moscow Lomonosov University from which he earned his M.A. while he holds Ph.D. and Dr.Sc. degrees from the Institute for African Studies under the Russian Academy of Sciences. Today Dmitri is Professor and Chair with the Department of Cultural Anthropology of the Center for Civilizational and Regional Studies, Senior Research Fellow with the Institute for African Studies (both under the Russian Academy of Sciences), and Professor with the Center of Social Anthropology of the Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow. Dmitri was a visiting scholar at the renowned Program of African Studies of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, U.S.A. He has conducted short-term surveys in such African countries as Nigeria and Tanzania. Dmitri is the author of about 150 publications on many aspects of world history and social anthropology including three books on pre-colonial Africa, two of which are devoted to the former Kingdom of Benin.