A Popular History of Benin

Contents: Popular-scientific description of the history of the former Kingdom of Benin (in today's Nigeria) - Including personal experiences.

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.