The Benin Kingdom was a sovereign state in pre-colonial West Africa. Sovereign in the sense that the Kingdom conducted and coordinated its internal and external affairs with its well structured political, social-cultural and economic institutions. One remarkable aspect of the Benin culture was the Igue festival. The festival was unique in the sense that it was a period when the Oba embarks on spiritual cleansing and prayers to departed ancestors for continued protection and growth of the land. The period of the festival was uncompromising and was spiritually adhered to. It was during this period that the British attempted to visit the Oba. This attempted visit to the land was declined by the Oba. An

The paper set out to explain the discontinuity in Soviet-Nigerian relations between the periods 1967-1970 and 1971-1979. The explanation usually given for the poor relations between Nigeria and the Soviet Union between 1960 and 1966 is the anti-communism of the Nigerian political elite; and ideological incompatibility for the non-vibrant relations between 1971 and 1979. These explanations appear idealistic and hypothetical. A major source of the problem of explanation is the consideration of Soviet-Nigerian relations only within the context of the Soviet-American Cold War struggle, from a trilateral perspective. What if the Cold War did not exist, what would have been the nature of Soviet-Nigerian relations? Adopting a bilateral framework, the paper argues that it was the inchoate state of trade relations, which would have provided the basis for continuity across administrations, that retarded Soviet-Nigerian political relations between 1971 and 1979.