Nigeria
Capital: Abuja · West Africa
Africa's most populous nation and one of its deepest cultural wells — Nok terracottas, Ife bronzes, Benin's royal art, the Sokoto Caliphate and over 500 languages.
Ethnic communities
- YorubaIfe and Oyo civilizations; orisha religion, bronze casting
- IgboNri kingdom, mbari houses, masquerades and republican governance
- HausaAncient city-states (Kano, Katsina) and centuries of urban trade
- FulaniPastoral nation and founders of the Sokoto Caliphate
- Edo (Benin)Benin Kingdom's world-famous brasses and royal court
- Ijaw, Efik, IbibioNiger Delta maritime cultures and Ekpe societies
More communities of Nigeria
- Edo (Bini) · Benin Kingdom's brasses and moats
- Kanuri · Bornu's thousand-year Islamic state
- Ijaw · Delta water-people of masquerade and mangrove
- Tiv · Benue farmers of egalitarian genius
- Ibibio & Annang · Ekpe society and raffia arts of the southeast
- Efik · Calabar's trading houses and ekombi grace
- Nupe · Niger-valley brass, glass and kingship
- Idoma & Igala · Benue-confluence kingdoms of masked ancestors
- Urhobo & Isoko · Western delta farmers of udje satire dance
- Itsekiri · Warri kingdom of river trade
- Jukun · Kwararafa's priest-kings of the Benue
- Gwari (Gbagyi) · Abuja plateau's first farmers and potters
- Berom & Plateau peoples · Tin-country terrace farmers of many tongues
- Ebira & Esan · Confluence and Edo-north farming kingdoms
Languages
Major languages: Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Fulfulde, Kanuri, Ijaw, English
Language families: Niger-Congo; Afro-Asiatic (Chadic); Nilo-Saharan (Kanuri)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Nok culture
- • Ife
- • Oyo Empire
- • Benin Kingdom
- • Kanem-Bornu
- • Sokoto Caliphate
- • Nri
Heritage sites
- • Sukur Cultural Landscape
- • Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove
- • Ancient Kano city walls
- • Benin City earthworks
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Nigeria
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Science, business & activismb. 1957
Aliko Dangote
Industry
Built Africa's largest cement and fertiliser group from a trading business, and the continent's biggest oil refinery, funding health and nutrition programmes alongside it.
- Music & the artsb. 1991
Burna Boy
Afro-fusion
Grammy winner and stadium headliner whose success carried a new generation of Nigerian music into the global mainstream.
- Music & the artsb. 1977
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Literature
Novelist of Half of a Yellow Sun, whose essays on story and on feminism have reached audiences far beyond the literary world.
- Music & the arts1930–2013
Chinua Achebe
Literature
Things Fall Apart, published in 1958, remade the way the world reads Africa and has sold more than twenty million copies in over fifty languages.
- Sportb. 1970
Chioma Ajunwa
Long jump
Won Nigeria's first Olympic gold in an individual event with a single leap in Atlanta in 1996, the first by a Black African woman.
- Music & the arts1938–1997
Fela Anikulapo Kuti
Afrobeat
Invented Afrobeat and used it as opposition politics, paying for it with repeated arrests and the army raid on his Kalakuta compound.
- Politics & liberation1900–1978
Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti
Women's rights
Led the Abeokuta Women's Union, forced a colonial-era ruler to abdicate over unfair taxes on market women and campaigned for women's suffrage.
- Sportb. 1963
Hakeem Olajuwon
Basketball
Two NBA championships and the 1994 MVP, with footwork borrowed from goalkeeping that is still taught as the Dream Shake.
- Music & the artsb. 1946
King Sunny Adé
Jùjú music
Took jùjú, with its talking drums and pedal steel guitar, to a global audience and earned two Grammy nominations.
- Science, business & activismb. 1954
Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala
Economics and global institutions
Development economist, twice Nigeria's finance minister, and the first woman and first African to lead the World Trade Organization.
- Politics & liberation1904–1996
Nnamdi Azikiwe
Independence
Journalist and nationalist known as Zik, first president of Nigeria and a founder of the West African independence press.
- Sportb. 1976
Nwankwo Kanu
Football
Olympic gold in 1996 with the Dream Team, two African Footballer of the Year awards, and a career resumed after open heart surgery at 20.
- Politics & liberation1909–1987
Obafemi Awolowo
Federalism and free education
Introduced free primary education and free health care in Western Nigeria in the 1950s, a model widely copied across the region.
- Science, business & activismb. 1954
Philip Emeagwali
Computing
Won the 1989 Gordon Bell Prize for work on massively parallel computation applied to oil reservoir modelling.
- Music & the artsb. 1934
Wole Soyinka
Drama and literature
First African laureate of the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1986, after imprisonment in solitary confinement for seeking to halt the Biafran war.
Deep-dive community profiles
Anaang (Annang)
People of the Cross River hinterland whose ekpo and ekpe societies governed before any state did, whose raffia weaving and wood carving are among the finest in Nigeria, and whose oratory gave the region its reputation for the most elaborate proverbs in West Africa.
Open deep profile →Bariba (Baatombu)
The horsemen of Borgu — whose Wasangari nobility rode against every empire that approached, whose Nikki and Parakou courts still hold the Gaani festival, and whose kingdom Islam, Songhai and the Sokoto Caliphate all failed to conquer.
Open deep profile →Berom
The plateau farmers of Jos — tin-country people of the Nzem festival and the mado initiation, whose terraced highland farms and stone-walled compounds held the cool heart of Nigeria's Middle Belt.
Open deep profile →Buduma (Yedina)
Island people of Lake Chad, herders of the amphibious kuri cattle and builders of papyrus boats, whose lake shrank by nine-tenths within a generation and whose islands became the base of an insurgency.
Open deep profile →Dendi
The Songhay of the far south — descendants of the Songhay empire's survivors who withdrew downriver after Tondibi, and who became the Muslim merchants of northern Benin's Niger valley towns.
Open deep profile →Ebira (Igbirra)
Weavers and farmers of the Okene highlands west of the confluence, makers of the hand-woven cloth that clothes half of Nigeria's ceremonies, and holders of the ekuechi masquerade in which the dead return once a year to speak in their own voices.
Open deep profile →Edo (Benin Kingdom)
The people of Benin City, whose Oba-centered civilization produced the world-renowned Benin Bronzes, a moated city that astonished early European visitors, and a living monarchy whose court ritual continues after seven centuries.
Open deep profile →Efik
The traders of Old Calabar — a Cross River people whose Ekpe leopard society governed the port, whose nsibidi ideographs crossed the Atlantic into Cuba, and whose kings' letters are among West Africa's earliest surviving African-written records.
Open deep profile →Esan (Ishan)
People of thirty-five small kingdoms on the plateau north-east of Benin City, whose Onojie rulers each hold an independent throne, and whose name is said to come from the Bini word for those who fled.
Open deep profile →Fulani (Fulbe)
The great pastoral nation of the Sahel — some 40 million people scattered from Senegal to Sudan, keepers of the pulaaku ethical code, founders of Islamic reform states, and among them the Wodaabe, whose Gerewol beauty festival is world-famous.
Open deep profile →Hausa
West Africa's greatest urban trading civilization — the walled city-states of Kano, Katsina and Zaria, a lingua franca spoken by over 80 million, centuries of Islamic scholarship, and the spectacular horsemanship of the Durbar.
Open deep profile →Holli (Ohori)
The forest Yoruba who stayed apart — a community of the Benin-Nigeria borderland known for resisting both the Dahomey kingdom and French rule, and for a scarification tradition so distinctive it functioned as a passport.
Open deep profile →Ibibio & Efik
The Cross River peoples of Nigeria's southeast — masters of the Ekpe leopard society and its nsibidi ideographic script, of the fattening-room bride, and of the raffia-and-wood masks that crossed the Atlantic to become Cuba's Abakuá.
Open deep profile →Idoma
The Benue valley people of the white-faced Ichahoho masks and the Alekwu ancestral cult — farmers and hunters whose Och'Idoma unites a once-stateless nation, and whose Ogrinya warrior dance still stamps the Middle Belt's festivals.
Open deep profile →Igala
People of the Niger-Benue confluence whose Attah kingdom at Idah fought Benin and the Royal Niger Company, whose bronze and brass work belongs to the Lower Niger tradition, and whose princess Inikpi is remembered as having been buried alive for her country.
Open deep profile →Igbo
One of Africa's great republican civilizations — over 35 million people of southeastern Nigeria whose village democracies, masquerade societies, Nri priest-kingship and the astonishing 9th-century bronzes of Igbo-Ukwu testify to deep indigenous sophistication.
Open deep profile →Ijaw (Izon)
The people of the Niger Delta's ten thousand creeks — canoe-house traders, masters of the water-spirit masquerades whose headdresses skim the surface like living fish, and the conscience of the Delta's oil age.
Open deep profile →Itsekiri
Traders and fishers of the Benin river's creeks whose Olu's kingdom of Warri dealt with Portugal from the 1480s, sent a prince to be educated in Lisbon, and produced Nana Olomu, the last great middleman the Royal Navy went to war against.
Open deep profile →Jukun (Wapan)
Heirs of Kwararafa — the confederacy that raided Kano and Bornu — whose Aku Uka is a divine king traditionally hidden from public view, and whose Puje festival and akuma masquerades keep a Benue kingdom's memory alive.
Open deep profile →Kanembu
The founding people of the Kanem empire — Lake Chad farmers and herders whose eleventh-century state was the first in the region to adopt Islam, whose mai ruled for a thousand years, and whose descendants still farm the lake's retreating shore.
Open deep profile →Kanuri
The imperial people of the Lake Chad basin — heirs of Kanem-Bornu, a Muslim state that lasted a thousand years, whose sultans corresponded with Istanbul and whose scholars, saddled cavalry and desert trade routes linked the Sahara to the savanna.
Open deep profile →Kapsiki (Higi)
Farmers and smiths of the Mandara mountains' volcanic plugs, whose blacksmith caste holds funerary, medical and divinatory monopoly, and whose landscape of basalt spires is Cameroon's most photographed.
Open deep profile →Kotoko
City builders of the Chari and Logone floodplain, heirs to the Sao whose walled towns and terracotta heads are among the Chad basin's oldest urban record, and rulers of small sultanates that predate Bornu.
Open deep profile →Mafa
The terrace builders of the Mandara mountains — one of the montagnard peoples who refused Islam and the Fulani jihad, who turned bare rock into some of Africa's most intensive agriculture, and whose villages became a front line against Boko Haram.
Open deep profile →Nupe
The river people of the Niger-Kaduna confluence — brass-smiths, glass-makers and boat-builders whose Bida emirate turned a pre-Islamic kingdom into a craft metropolis, and whose gugu and ndakogboya masquerades still walk the Middle Belt.
Open deep profile →Ogoni
Farmers and fishers of a small, dense territory in the Niger Delta whose campaign against Shell and the Nigerian state cost Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others their lives in 1995, and whose land the UN found would take thirty years to clean.
Open deep profile →Shuwa Arabs (Baggara of the Chad basin)
Cattle Arabs of the Lake Chad basin whose ancestors crossed the Sahel from the Nile a thousand years ago, whose dialect is the westernmost Arabic in the world, and who make up a large part of Chad's population and its army.
Open deep profile →Tiv
The great egalitarian farmers of the Benue valley — a segmentary nation of yam and sesame growers whose a'kombo ritual repairs the world, whose swange rhythms and kwagh-hir puppet theatre dazzle Nigeria, and who famously never had kings.
Open deep profile →Urhobo
The people of the Delta's freshwater swamps — whose colossal edjo re akare shrine figures stand over ancestral halls, whose Ohworu water-spirit masquerade rises from the creeks, and whose twenty-two kingdoms hold the oil country's western flank.
Open deep profile →Wodaabe
The cattle nomads of the southern Sahara's edge — a Fulani group who kept the older pastoral life when others settled, and whose Guerewol festival has men in ochre and white paint dancing for hours to be judged on beauty by women.
Open deep profile →Yoruba
One of Africa's great urban civilizations — over 40 million people whose sacred city of Ilé-Ifẹ̀, orisha religion, divination science and bronze-casting mastery have shaped world culture from Lagos to Bahia and Havana.
Open deep profile →