Nigeria

Nigeria takes its name from the Niger, which meets its great tributary, the Benue, at Lokoja before turning south and breaking into the Niger Delta, a maze of creeks and mangroves that also holds the country’s oil. Rainforest in the south gives way northwards to open savannah, and the far north reaches into the dry Sahel near Lake Chad. The Jos Plateau rises in the centre. In the dry season the dusty harmattan wind blows in from the Sahara.

Terracotta sculptures of the Nok culture are more than two thousand years old. Later came the kingdoms of Ife and Benin, whose bronze and brass heads rank among Africa’s finest art, the Oyo empire of the Yoruba, and the walled Hausa city-states of the north, which became part of the Sokoto Caliphate. Britain joined its northern and southern protectorates in 1914, and Nigeria became independent in 1960. A civil war over the secession of Biafra followed from 1967 to 1970.

Hundreds of ethnic groups live here, the largest being the Hausa and Fulani of the north, the Yoruba of the south-west and the Igbo of the south-east. Wole Soyinka became Africa’s first Nobel laureate in literature in 1986, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is read worldwide, and Fela Kuti created Afrobeat. Nollywood turns out films by the thousand. Oil and gas dominate exports, but most people earn a living from farming and trade: yams, cassava, cocoa and the great markets of Lagos, Onitsha and Kano.