Benin

Franco-Senegalese actor and film-maker Mati Diop made history in 2019 as the first woman of colour to have a movie selected for competition at Cannes, the poetic migrant drama Atlantique. Now she brings an intriguing, 67-minute long documentary feature to Berlin: a kind of realist jeu d’ésprit or interrogative reverie about colonialism, culture, the past and the present. Dahomey is about the return in 2021 of looted treasures from France to the west African state of Benin, items plundered by French troops in 1892. These…

Anne Luther, a digital heritage specialist and one of Digital Benin’s principal investigators, hopes the project will be a model for other communities that want to explore how technology can be used to help them reconnect with and reclaim stolen artifacts. “Before Digital Benin, digital restitution was not a conversation being had by larger institutions,” Luther says.  In building the catalogue, the team received more than 400 data sets from 131 institutions in 20 countries, which they then drew from in order to make…

Nigeria’s crude oil production dropped in November, data from the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has shown. Oil production from the 13 members of the organisation averaged 27.84 million barrels per day (mb/d) in November 2023, lower by 57 thousand barrels per day (tb/d), month-on-month, OPEC said in its Monthly Oil Market Report released Wednesday. The report also noted that crude oil output increased mainly in Venezuela, Libya and Kuwait, while production in Iraq, Angola and Nigeria…

COVID-19 Chinese team posts key DNA from market After intense pressure and criticism from many scientists, Chinese researchers last week released a trove of new genetic data that may offer fresh clues about the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some scientists say the new evidence gives more credibility to the thesis that SARS-CoV-2 could have jumped into humans from raccoon dogs or other mammals illegally sold at a Wuhan market. Researchers mainly affiliated with…

Some of the 313 manillas excavated by the Sociedad de Ciencias Aranzadi from a Flemish trader lost in 1524 off Getaria in Basque Country, northern Spain. The ship was chartered by Portuguese merchants from Lisbon. Credit: Ana Maria Benito-Dominguez, CC-BY 4.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) The renowned Benin Bronzes are composed of metal sourced from Germany, according to a study published April 5, 2023, in the…

Fidelity Bank has named Pamela Shodipo, the managing director of the Benin Republic subsidiary of United Bank for Africa (UBA) between December 2021 and November 2022, as an executive director. In a regulatory filing, the bank said Mrs Shodipo will head the South Directorate of the lender which, as part of the push to join the rank of Nigeria’s top banks by tier 1 capital, last August announced a pact to buy out rival Union Bank’s UK unit. The appointment has the endorsement of the Central Bank of Nigeria, the…