Nigeria

From the Nok artisans and the great Sahelian and forest kingdoms to a colonial amalgamation, a hard-won independence, and Africa's most populous nation.

The land that became Nigeria holds one of Africa's deepest and richest pasts. As early as the first millennium BCE, the Nok culture of the central plateau was casting striking terracotta figures and smelting iron. Over the following centuries, powerful states arose across the region: the trans-Saharan empire of Kanem-Bornu around Lake Chad, the trading Hausa city-states of the north, the cavalry empire of Oyo and the artistic kingdom of Benin in the forest south, and the Igbo communities of the southeast whose Igbo-Ukwu bronzes astonish to this day. From the sixteenth century the Atlantic slave trade drew the coastal regions into a brutal commerce that deported enormous numbers of people, while in 1804 the jihad of Usman dan Fodio created the vast Sokoto Caliphate across the north. Britain conquered these lands piece by piece during the nineteenth century, joining the Northern and Southern Protectorates into a single colony in 1914. Nigeria won independence on 1 October 1960, but its early decades were scarred by the Biafran civil war of 1967 to 1970 and long stretches of military rule, before the return to civilian government in 1999 inaugurated the Fourth Republic and the modern, oil-rich, intensely diverse federation of more than 200 million people.