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The peoples of the Bight of Benin coast first came into contact with Europeans as early as the fourteenth century. The Europeans, as part of their plans to develop the Americas, subsequently initiated a mammoth slave trade that would last for four centuries.

From the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, coastal communities of the Gulf of Guinea colluded in the transatlantic trade, making this stretch of the coastline famous as the “Slave Coast”, a grim name reflecting its importance in the supply of slaves.

The international slave trade, however, generated sources of written and iconographical materials kept in a large number of Western countries, especially those involved in that activity, but also in the West African countries of embarkation.

In Benin, the archives relating to the slave trade and slavery are heterogeneous, for the simple reason that much of the documentation was scattered and destroyed by some of the colonial powers on the eve of independence.

Materials on the trade are to be found in a whole range of sources contained in the archives documenting colonial times and, hence, preserved in the same conditions. These materials mainly consist of political reports and correspondence.

The National Archives of Benin has a library featuring several titles on slavery and the slave trade.