Nigeria (1960- ), which has more people than any other country in Africa, has a third of all the people of Black Africa. It lies at the western end of the Guinea Coast, where the great Niger River that it was named after flows into the sea.
Like Iraq, Nigeria was created by lines drawn on the map to serve British trade interests. It is divided by both language and religion. In effect Nigeria is a bit of the British Empire that broke free in 1960. So far only military strongmen have been able to hold it together for long. Sometimes Nigeria is a democracy, sometimes it is a banana republic.
Near the mouth of the Niger River is some of the purest oil in the world. But so far this great wealth has gone to Western oil companies, particularly Shell, and the corrupt few at the top, not to the country as a whole. Part of the coast has been destroyed by repeated oil spills.
Nigeria has big cities and towns, which are growing fast, but most Nigerians are still farmers who grow food to feed their families.
Nigeria grew out of a British trade empire set up along the Niger River by Sir George Goldie. In the 1880s and 1890s his company ran much of what is now Nigeria. So at the Berlin Conference in 1885, when the powers of Europe divided Africa among themselves like a birthday cake, setting off the Scramble for Africa, Britain got this bit, among many others.
The British government did not step in to take over till 1900 when it conquered the rest of the country. But by 1945 the British Empire had gone broke fighting Hitler. It could no longer hold on to its empire. Nigeria became independent in 1960.
Religion: In the north nearly everyone is Muslim, but in the south most are Christians, though some still practise traditional religions. This is where obeah, the voodoo of Jamaica, comes from.
Where the Muslim north meets the Christian south thousands have died in religious violence over the past ten years. As in Sudan, many in the Muslim north want to run the country according to sharia or Muslim law.
Language: English, the old imperial tongue, is the only language known all over the country. Like in India, most people in towns and cities know it as a second language. Most films are in English. Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, makes more films than Hollywood.
Apart from English, the three largest languages are:
- Hausa in the north
- Yoruba in the south-west
- Igbo in the south-east
There are about 500 smaller languages. Yoruba and Hausa extend beyond Nigeria.
In 1967 the Igbo south-east, which has most of the country’s oil but sees little benefit from it, broke away and formed their own country of Biafra. A million died in the three years of civil war that followed. Biafra lost, Nigeria held together.
See also:
This site claims to be pro-black, but instead it is demeaning to the root of blackness, Africa. Comments about Nigeria and its validity are untrue and are figments of Western Education about Africa and its parts. Just because the citizens of this country do not all speak the same language does not make it an “unreal” nation. In this article you practically glorify Britain and exclude the horrendous nature of colonization. Native people were exploited for the sake of oil, diamonds, cacoa beans, and sugar. Books on Africa’s history were destroyed and labeled as paganism or the adulation of “evil spirits”. You make mention of the Berlin Conference of 1885, where the nations of Africa were torn asunder. That should be indicative of Africa’s current disarray. The Europeans left the continent in pandemonium and now televise the plight in which corrupt Africans for inflicted on the nation. It was the Europeans who had destroyed the cultural and religious infrastructure in which the tribes of Africa had co-habitated in peacefully for hundreds of years. You wrote this article with such disdain and supremacy, the same way the White world often times looks at Africans. You failed to bring attention to the beautiful people who dwell in the West African nation.
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Are there any good online histories of Nigeria that you recommend?
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Abagond:
Sudan is actually the largest country in Africa, and Algeria the second. It really bothers me the amount of exploitation that black people, at large, have suffered and are still suffering.
Africa is the richest continent in natural resources but also the poorest continent in terms of wealth. The people there are rich in culture and tradition but many are poor in health, and although most work hard, they hardly get paid anything for their labor. Check out just how low the currency there is in the majority of these countries compared to the US and Europe, but the US and European are the main ones reaping the benefits of Africa’s womb. Realistically speaking, Africa should be the richest continent of the seven. However, due to the continual exploitation of the many white nations, this is not the case. Of course, the corruption in the governmental system as you mentioned (also foundational ran by whites) plays it part as well. Overall, it is a very sad thing, though—funny enough, most people just turn there heads and believe Africans are just over there killing themselves, not really looking at the many underlying issues.
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Nigeria is largest by number of people is what I meant. I corrected the post.
Right, Africa is the richest and yet the poorest continent in the world.
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In your response to go online history, I have listed a few below…
http://www.motherlandnigeria.com/history.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Nigeria
http://www.iss.co.za/Af/profiles/Nigeria/Politics.html
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Thank you very much!
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Most of your facts about my country are incorrect. The corruption ones are true, but the fact that 3/5 speak one of the main languages are incorrect, and many, most, of the people in Nigeria are not just poor countries. I understand what you are trying to say, and it is not the worst thing that I have heard about Nigeria. The language that most Nigerians (living in the town or city) speak is English, so there is a common language there
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I base my numbers on this:
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_country.asp?name=NG
That has Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba each at 18 million Nigerians in the early 1990s at a time when Nigeria had about 103 million people. Unless there is a huge overlap between the three, that would be close to the 3/5ths I talked about.
Thanks for the info about English in Nigeria – that most people in towns and cities can speak it.
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Every Nigerian can speak pidgin english whether in the city, town, or village. And we’re not as poor as the western world loves to believe.
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“Sometimes Nigeria is a democracy, sometimes it is a banana republic”.
abagond i would advise you to research more on the role america and britain have played in creating the banana republic that you refer to.
the british armed and funded the northerners causing the death by of more than 3m igbos in the south.
america and britain are the main architects of the economic destabilisation of nigeria, you seem to be completely ignorant of the west’s culpability in the destruction of nigeria, america even had as official govt policy the depopulation of various third world countries and nigeria was one of the countries listed for depopulation by fomenting wars, causing famine and the use of biological weapons please read the former national security adviser to richard nixon, henry kissinger’s memorandum 200 (nssm 200) written in 1974 which stated that nigeria’s population growth was a threat to america’s national security as it would increase their (nigeria’s) political, economic and military strength.
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I did not know about NSSM 200. Thank you for that. A banana republic, though, means that the government serves the interests of foreign powers over that of its own people:
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This post is pretty negative, Abagond. I was expecting to read something about the culture and people when I clicked on this post., not about abject poverty and war; even an American history book wouldn’t be this bad. A recent study found Nigeria to have the happiest people in the world, so clearly they are doing something right: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/3157570.stm
I checked your posts on Sudan, Britain, and France for comparison and the two latter are much more positive. You were similarly negative about Sudan. What’s with that? Is this supposed to serve some kind of purpose? Help me out here. Because in your recent post about the way that blacks are portrayed on television you mentioned how Africa is seen as incapable of peace and civilization, yet you paint a similar picture here.
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Excellent point. As it turns out, part of how I know how twisted and limited the American and British view of Africa is is by trying to write about it myself. It is a big reason why I do not write about Africa more.
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there is large nigerian dispora here in the uk.
I like them they are very friendly (loud lol) with good foods.
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abagond i think you should write about africa more without getting your info from western sources, the more you research africa the more you will find that the west are actively working to keep it poor and economically stagnant. there is an ongoing agenda of destabilisation in africa similar to what is happening in the middle east. america’a aim is to ensure that they retain their positon of economic and military power whilst simultaneously keeping africa, latin america and parts of asia backward and dependant.
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“In the north nearly everyone is Muslim, but in the south most are Christians, though some still worship evil spirits”
Evil spirits are NOT worshipped in Nigeria or any other part of Africa, these are Eurocentric misconcepts that originated from Europeans’ views that traditional African religions were witchcraft and backward.
Traditional religions in Nigeria are extremely sophisticated and include a pantheon of diverse gods who are responsible for a myriad of natual phenomena such as Shango, god of lighting, Ogun, god of iron and Oya, goddess of the Niger river and fertility. These religions are still practiced by a few in Nigeria but primarily live on in Brazil in the form of Candomble and as Santeria in Cuba, where they have been mixed with Catholicism.
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Chinny is very quick to point out how the Northerners massacred the Igbos but of course she won’t say who started the whole thing.
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there are lots of nigerian people where live and most of them are igbo. sometimes i find nigerians to be rude and boastful towards other countries in africa(i.e ghana)
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Nigeria is a real nation regardless if all the people speak one language or not and those who do not fall under Christian or Islam, do not worship evil spirits, they are pagans. There are some problems in ur post that I do find offensive, being a Nigerian myself. Please correct the mistakes.
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Religion: In the north nearly everyone is Muslim, but in the south most are Christians, though some still worship evil spirits. This is where obeah, the voodoo of Jamaica, comes from.
Whoah! I didn’t see that there.
I wonder what would happen if a white guy called the Orixá “evil spirits”?
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Very Interesting post. ‘just stumbled upon it by mistake. I do not know why a lot of people whose names I see here are Nigerian decided to respond to Abagond’s biased views which I need not comment on. All I have to say is you should step down from your ‘high horse’ and take a trip to Nigeria out of curiosity ( if you can afford it) and educate your self. The worst fool is the one who does not know he is one. Then intelligent and assertive comments could be made based on facts encoded on one’s semantic memory and help educate others. it is sad that chinny would make the above comment on this site but even more demeaning that NG would glorify that statement with an answer!!!!Gosh!!
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“Evil spirits are NOT worshipped in Nigeria or any other part of Africa, these are Eurocentric misconcepts that originated from Europeans’ views that traditional African religions were witchcraft and backward”
Couldnt have said it better myself
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Yeah I’m not comfortable with the entire ‘religion’ section either. Traditional religions don’t deal in the worship of evil spirits. And people in Northern Nigeria actually do practice elements of traditional religion, sometimes they are mixed with Islam though.
As someone who belongs to a largely southern ethnic group but comes from the administrative North, I am always amazed when I read descriptions of Nigeria’s religious landscape. It is like there is a line that divides the ‘Muslim North’ from the ‘Christian South’. There are actually a lot of Muslims in the South, particularly in the South-West and there are a lot of Christians in the North (not the ‘Middle Belt’ but as far North as Gombe and Maiduguri states).
The state/province I come from lies in the supposed middle of this ‘Muslim North’ and ‘Christian South’ and those lines are not clearly drawn when you consider families that are made of different religions and ethnic groups. I also don’t think you can compare Nigeria to Sudan, most of the Northern states already use and practice sharia law. Then again I believe that most of what the Western media has reported on Sudan isn’t the whole story either.
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@ eccentricyoruba
This post is very much a work in progress. Africa, I have discovered, is very hard to write about well if you mainly depend on Western sources.
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@ abagond
I appreciate your work though! Even within the continent there are a lot of people who depend on Western sources for information, it gets on my nerves sometimes because they fail to see the agenda behind such sources. I wish you the best in continuing this work! I’ll be keeping an eye out as well.
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nigeria
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Naija women are so hot. From the bodacious Yoruba to the slim and “mixed” facial features the Igbo. To the dark and slim Hausa to the mesmerising looks of the Fulani.
I just can’t imagine how Nigerian men don’t have permament 3rd legs when so many of the women are so hot!
Btw I know that Igbo and Fulani are not mixed. (Well the Fulani have about 10% western eurasian dna. That’s hardly what most people will call mixed!)
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Nigeria is too complex to write a short post on, but this is a useful overview. I recommend posts on Benin, Oyo, Nri, Hausa city-states like Kano, the Fulani ‘jihads’ of the 1800s, Sokoto Caliphate, British colonialism in the north vs. South, violence and imperialism in the Niger Delta, the growth of Lagos, Fela, Wole Soyinka, Nok terracotta art, Yoruba art, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Nigeria as Africa’s largest economy, and the rise of sharia law and Muslim conservatism.
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@ talibmensah
Yes to posts on the Fulani jihad and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
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I know that I’m nitpicking again but it is not out of ill intent. If the continent of Africa has about 1 billion people and the population of Nigeria is nearly 175 million, then Nigeria could not have a third of the continent’s inhabitants. Instead the number is closer to two tenths of the population. An interesting article on Nigeria, could you do the Caribbean? 🙂
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