Ozolua
Ozolua was the Oba of Benin whom the kingdom's own tradition calls the Conqueror, the son of Ewuare who won the throne from his brothers, spent his reign campaigning to the edges of the Edo world, received the first Portuguese who reached the city, and was killed by his own soldiers, tired of a war that would not end, at a siege on the western frontier. His name as a prince was Okpame. Ewuare's death about 1473 set the two surviving sons against each other, and the elder, Ezoti, reigned for fourteen days before he was shot with an arrow at his coronation; the next, Olua, ruled briefly and Okpame took the throne about 1481. The oral histories, recorded by the court historian Jacob Egharevba in the 1930s, credit him with two hundred battles and give him the name of a man who did not know how to lose. He fought the Ishan and the Owo to the north and east and the Ijebu Yoruba to the west, and it was to Ozolua that the Portuguese came. The captain Joao Afonso de Aveiro reached Benin City in 1486, was received at court, and left with a Benin envoy for Lisbon; he brought back guns, cloth and missionaries, and a trade in pepper and slaves for brass began at the Benin river port of Ughoton. Ozolua sent his son to be schooled by the Portuguese, and the brass manillas the ships brought became the metal of the plaques that were cast for the palace pillars over the next century. His brass heads and the ivory masks of the period are among the finest things Benin made. The end came at Uzea, a town of the Ishan, where the army had been camped for a year in the rain. The soldiers, the tradition says, opened a way for the enemy to reach him, and he died about 1504, to be succeeded by the son the Portuguese had taught, Esigie.
- Nationality: Edo
- Roles: king, monarch, warrior
