Nigeria

The Nok culture of the central plateau made terracotta heads and figures between roughly 500 BC and AD 200, some of the oldest figurative sculpture south of the Sahara, and smelted iron at the same time. Its pieces turn up in tin-mining pits and, sadly, on the illicit art market.

In the forest to the south-west, Ile-Ife became the sacred city of the Yoruba, where the gods are said to have descended to create the world. Between the 12th and 15th centuries its artists cast naturalistic heads in copper alloy and modelled them in terracotta. Oyo later grew into a cavalry empire across the savanna, and the Yoruba world spread over many city-kingdoms, each with its oba.

The kingdom of Benin, in today's Edo State, built walls and moats around its capital and a guild system that produced the Benin bronzes: plaques and heads recording court life and the arrival of the Portuguese. British troops sacked the city in 1897 and carried thousands of objects to Europe; returns began in the 2020s and remain a live debate.

In the north, Kanem-Bornu around Lake Chad and the Hausa city-states such as Kano, Katsina and Zaria grew rich on trans-Saharan trade and adopted Islam. From 1804 the Fulani scholar Usman dan Fodio led a jihad that created the Sokoto Caliphate, one of the largest states in 19th-century Africa. The Sultan of Sokoto is still the spiritual leader of Nigeria's Muslims.

Britain annexed Lagos in 1861, partly to end the slave trade from the lagoon, and pushed inland through trading companies and treaties. The Royal Niger Company controlled the river trade until 1900, when the crown took over the north and south as separate protectorates.

In 1914 Frederick Lugard merged them into one colony. The north was ruled indirectly through emirs, with Christian missions kept out; the south got mission schools, cash crops and a coastal elite. The two halves developed at very different speeds, and that imbalance runs through Nigerian politics to this day.

Nationalist parties formed along regional lines: the NCNC with strong Igbo support, the Action Group in the Yoruba west and the Northern People's Congress. Independence came on 1 October 1960 as a federation of three regions, with Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as prime minister.

Oil was found at Oloibiri in the Niger Delta in 1956. By the 1970s it dominated exports and government revenue, feeding a boom, fierce competition for federal money and deep grievances in the Delta, where pollution and poverty sit beside the wells.

Two coups in 1966 and killings of Igbo people in the north led the Eastern Region to secede as the Republic of Biafra in May 1967 under Odumegwu Ojukwu. The federal blockade caused mass famine; by the surrender in January 1970 perhaps a million people had died. 'No victor, no vanquished' was the official line, but the memory is raw in the south-east.

Military rulers governed for most of the next thirty years, with a short civilian republic from 1979 to 1983. They multiplied the states, moved the capital to the new city of Abuja in 1991, and under Sani Abacha in the 1990s executed the writer and Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Annulled elections in 1993 are remembered on Democracy Day, 12 June.

Civilian rule returned in 1999. In 2015 Muhammadu Buhari became the first opposition candidate to defeat a sitting president, and in 2023 Bola Tinubu won the presidency and quickly floated the naira and ended the fuel subsidy, setting off inflation and hardship.

The state faces several security crises at once: the Boko Haram and Islamic State insurgency in the north-east since 2009, armed banditry and mass kidnappings in the north-west, farmer-herder clashes in the Middle Belt, separatist violence in the south-east and militancy in the Delta. These are why travel advice differs so much from state to state.

Nigeria has around 230 million people and one of the youngest populations in the world, with a median age under 20. More than 250 ethnic groups speak over 500 languages. The Hausa and Fulani dominate the north, the Yoruba the south-west and the Igbo the south-east; the Ijaw, Kanuri, Ibibio, Tiv, Edo and many others are large nations in their own right.

English is the official language, but Nigerian Pidgin is the true lingua franca of markets, music and jokes, understood across ethnic lines. Radio and television broadcast in Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo as well.

Lagos, with perhaps 15–20 million people, is the engine: ports, banks, tech startups, fashion and an endless traffic jam. Abuja is the planned capital, orderly and administrative. Kano is the old commercial heart of the north. Millions of Nigerians live abroad, and their remittances and holiday visits shape December in Lagos.

Social life turns on family, titles and occasions. Weddings, naming ceremonies and funerals are lavish, with matching outfits ('aso ebi') chosen by the family and cash 'sprayed' on dancers. Respect for age is expressed in greeting: a Yoruba young man may prostrate himself before an elder, a young woman kneel.

Nigeria is split roughly in half between Muslims and Christians. Islam arrived in the north through trade from the 11th century and was deepened by the Sokoto jihad; since 2000 twelve northern states apply sharia criminal law to Muslims. Christianity spread with missions in the south from the 19th century, and Pentecostal megachurches along the Lagos–Ibadan expressway now draw congregations in the hundreds of thousands.

Religion is everywhere in public life: bumper stickers, business names, political balancing between a Muslim and a Christian on the presidential ticket. It is also a fault line, and religious and ethnic violence has flared repeatedly in Jos, Kaduna and elsewhere.

Yoruba traditional religion, centred on the orisha such as Ogun (iron), Sango (thunder) and Osun (the river goddess), survives in shrines, festivals and the Ifa divination system, recognised by UNESCO. It crossed the Atlantic with enslaved people and lives on as Candomblé in Brazil and Santería in Cuba.

The Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove, a forest on the Osun River, is dedicated to the goddess and filled with sculptures made from the 1950s by the Austrian artist Susanne Wenger and local artists. Its annual festival in August draws worshippers and visitors from the diaspora.

Nigeria's cultural exports are among Africa's biggest. Fela Kuti fused highlife, jazz and funk into Afrobeat in 1970s Lagos and used it to attack military rule. Today's Afrobeats stars such as Burna Boy, Wizkid and Tems fill arenas worldwide, and the New Afrika Shrine in Ikeja keeps Fela's club alive.

Nollywood, the Lagos film industry, grew from straight-to-video dramas in the 1990s into one of the world's largest producers by volume, now with streaming deals. Nigerian literature runs from Amos Tutuola and Chinua Achebe through Wole Soyinka, Africa's first Nobel laureate in literature, to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and a new generation.

Art matters too: the Osogbo and Nsukka schools, Nike Okundaye's textile workshops and a strong gallery scene in Lagos. The annual Art X Lagos fair and many private collections have made the city a centre for contemporary African art.

Food is regional but jollof, suya and pepper soup are national. Southerners eat 'swallows' such as pounded yam and eba with soups thickened with egusi seeds or leafy greens; northerners eat grain porridges and grilled meat. Parties are measured by the quality of the jollof, and Nigerians argue fiercely with Ghanaians about whose is better.