Traditions Documents And the Ife Benin Relationship

Historians of Nigeria have been curious for many years about the relationship between the various states of the southern zone since the sixteenth century. The fact that the area has produced rich art has a fairly elaborate set of traditional histories, and has been the subject of some systematic archaeological work, means that the modern scholar has somewhat more to go on in reconstructing the region’s history than just the fairly sparse and disappointing contemporary texts that came out of the early Portuguese contacts and subsequent European trade and navigation. But contemporary documentation for southern Nigeria remains much weaker than that for other African areas, such as the central African zone, Gold Coast, or the western Atlantic coast.