The history of Nigeria

Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, was created by Britain in 1914 out of lands that had been home to some of the continent's most accomplished societies: the sculptors of Nok and Ife, the bronze-casting kingdom of Benin, the Yoruba empire of Oyo, the Igbo priest-kingdom of Nri, the trading city-states of Hausaland and the ancient empire of Kanem-Bornu. In the nineteenth century much of the north was united by the Sokoto Caliphate, while the coast was drawn first into the Atlantic slave trade and then into the palm-oil trade with Europe. British conquest between 1851 and 1903 joined these very different worlds into one colony, which became independent in 1960. Independence was followed by coups, a devastating civil war over Biafra, decades of military rule and an oil economy that brought wealth and conflict, before civilian government returned in 1999.

Stone tools show that people lived in the region for many tens of thousands of years. A human skull found at Iwo Eleru in the south-west, dated to about 13,000 years ago, is one of the more puzzling fossils in African prehistory, because its shape recalls much older humans. In the north-east, the Dufuna canoe, a dugout found in Yobe State and dated to about 8,000 years ago, is the oldest known boat in Africa, a reminder that the Lake Chad basin was then a land of lakes and rivers. As the Sahara dried after about 3000 BCE, people moved south and settled into farming communities growing yams, sorghum, millet and oil palms.

The great majority of Nigerians speak languages of the Niger-Congo family, and the Benue valley on the eastern border is close to the region where the Bantu languages are thought to have begun before the Bantu expansion carried them across central and southern Africa. In the north-east, Chadic languages such as Hausa and Nilo-Saharan languages such as Kanuri reflect older links with the Sahara and the Lake Chad basin.

The Nok culture, named after a village in southern Kaduna State where tin miners found its sculptures in the 1940s, flourished on the Jos Plateau and in the surrounding hills during the first millennium BCE, with roots that may reach back to about 1500 BCE. Its people made large terracotta figures of men and women with elaborately dressed hair, finely carved jewellery and distinctive triangular or D-shaped eyes, among the oldest figurative sculpture south of the Sahara. They were also among the earliest iron smelters in West Africa, working iron by the middle of the first millennium BCE, and archaeologists debate whether this technology developed locally or spread from elsewhere. Some scholars see echoes of Nok style in the later art of Ife and other cultures.

In the south-east, excavations at Igbo-Ukwu uncovered bronzes of the ninth and tenth centuries CE: ritual vessels, shells and ornaments cast by the lost-wax method with a delicacy unmatched anywhere in the world at the time. They were found with tens of thousands of glass beads, some of which had come across the Sahara, showing long-distance trade. The finds are linked to the Kingdom of Nri, a sacred polity in the Igbo heartland whose priest-king, the Eze Nri, held religious rather than military authority. Agents of Nri travelled through Igboland to cleanse abominations, settle disputes and crown titled men. Most Igbo communities, however, were governed not by kings but by councils of elders, title societies and village assemblies.

Around Lake Chad, the Kanem-Bornu Empire was one of the longest-lasting states in African history. Kanem arose north-east of the lake by the ninth century; its Sayfawa dynasty adopted Islam in the late eleventh century under Mai Hume, and its kings made the pilgrimage to Mecca. In the late fourteenth century, pressed by the Bulala, the dynasty moved west of the lake into Bornu, where it founded a walled capital at Ngazargamu. Bornu reached its height under Mai Idris Alooma, who reigned in the late sixteenth century, armed his troops with muskets obtained through the Ottoman Empire, reformed the law on Islamic lines and reconquered Kanem. The empire traded slaves, horses and salt with North Africa along the route through the Fezzan to Tripoli.

West of Bornu, in a land that straddles the modern border with Niger, lay the Hausa city-states, among them Kano, Katsina, Zazzau (Zaria), Gobir, Daura and Rano, which emerged between about the tenth and fourteenth centuries. Their foundation legend tells of Bayajidda, a prince from Baghdad who killed a serpent at Daura and married its queen. Each state was built around a walled city with a market, a ruler and a court of titled officials. Kano became the greatest commercial centre of the region: traders from the Mali Empire brought Islam in the fourteenth century, and Muhammad Rumfa, who ruled from 1463 to 1499, built a new palace, expanded the city walls and the great market, and took advice from the North African scholar al-Maghili. Kano cloth, dyed indigo in its pits, was sold across West Africa. Zazzau's tradition remembers Queen Amina, a sixteenth-century warrior ruler. The Hausa states fought one another, paid tribute at times to Bornu and to the Songhai Empire, and saw the rise of Kebbi in the north-west, but they were never united until the nineteenth century.

Among the Yoruba of the south-west, Ile-Ife grew into a city between about the eleventh and fifteenth centuries. It is the sacred centre of Yoruba tradition, where the god Oduduwa is said to have created the land and founded the line of kings. Ife's artists cast naturalistic heads in copper alloys and modelled them in terracotta, portraits of such calm realism that early European observers refused to believe they were African. The city also produced glass beads in large quantities. Ife's ruler, the Ooni, remained a spiritual authority over many Yoruba kingdoms whose founders claimed descent from Oduduwa.

The most powerful of these became the Oyo Empire, north of the forest on the savanna, where horses could survive. From the seventeenth century Oyo's cavalry made it the dominant power between the Niger and the Volta. The Alaafin, or king, governed alongside a council of nobles, the Oyo Mesi, led by the Bashorun, who could in theory require an unpopular king to take his own life. After repeated invasions, Oyo forced Dahomey in modern Benin to pay it tribute in the eighteenth century, and it sold captives to European traders at the coast. In the early nineteenth century the empire broke apart: Afonja, the commander at Ilorin, rebelled in 1817 and called on Fulani support, Ilorin became an emirate of the Sokoto Caliphate, and the old capital was abandoned in the 1830s. New Yoruba powers such as Ibadan and Abeokuta fought a long series of wars for the succession that lasted until the 1880s.

East of the Yoruba, the Edo Kingdom of Benin grew in the forest around Benin City. Its tradition tells of an early line of Ogiso kings, followed by a dynasty linked to Oranmiyan, a prince of Ife. Oba Ewuare, who came to power around 1440, rebuilt the capital, extended its vast system of earthwork walls and moats and began a period of conquest. Portuguese envoys arrived in 1486, and in the sixteenth century the kingdom traded pepper, ivory, cloth and, for a time, captives for brass, coral and guns. The guild of brass-casters produced thousands of plaques, heads and figures for the royal palace, recording kings, warriors, ceremonies and even the Portuguese visitors themselves. Benin restricted the sale of male captives for long periods, but the kingdom remained a major power on the coast until the end of the nineteenth century.

From the late fifteenth century the Portuguese Empire, and later Dutch, French and above all British traders, bought enslaved people along the coast that Europeans called the Bight of Benin and the Bight of Biafra. Over the following three and a half centuries the region became one of the largest sources of captives in the Atlantic slave trade. Hundreds of thousands of Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa and others were carried to Brazil, the Caribbean and North America, where their languages, religions and music shaped the cultures of the Americas. Captives came from wars, raids, judicial punishments and kidnapping, and were sold through African networks to the coast.

In the Niger Delta and the Cross River, trading city-states such as Bonny, Elem Kalabari, Brass and Old Calabar grew rich as middlemen, organised in trading houses that could absorb slaves and outsiders as members. In the Igbo interior, the Aro, whose oracle at Arochukwu was consulted across the region, built a commercial network that supplied many of the captives sold at the coast. After Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807 and began patrolling the coast, the trade gradually shifted towards palm oil, needed in Britain for soap and machine lubricants. In 1851 a British naval force attacked Lagos and installed a ruler who promised to end the trade, and in 1861 Britain annexed Lagos as a colony. Freed slaves returning from Sierra Leone and Brazil, and Christian missionaries, began to transform Lagos, Abeokuta and Calabar; one returnee, Samuel Ajayi Crowther, a Yoruba man rescued from a slave ship as a boy, became the first African bishop of the Anglican Church in 1864.

In the far north, a religious revolution transformed Hausaland. Usman dan Fodio, a Fulani scholar and preacher from Gobir, criticised the Hausa kings for heavy taxes, injustice and a mixed form of Islam. After the king of Gobir turned against his community, Usman and his followers withdrew to Gudu in 1804 and declared a jihad. Within a few years Fulani and Hausa supporters had overthrown most of the Hausa kings, Gobir's capital Alkalawa fell in 1808, and in 1809 his son Muhammad Bello founded Sokoto as the new capital. The jihad even sacked the Bornu capital of Ngazargamu in 1808, but Bornu survived under the leadership of the scholar and soldier Muhammad al-Kanemi, whose descendants replaced the ancient Sayfawa dynasty in 1846.

The Sokoto Caliphate became the largest state in West Africa in the nineteenth century, a confederation of some thirty emirates, including Kano, Zaria, Katsina, Adamawa, Nupe and Ilorin, each paying tribute to the caliph, the Sultan of Sokoto, while the western emirates looked to Gwandu. It was a centre of Islamic learning, in which Usman, his brother Abdullahi and his daughter Nana Asma'u wrote hundreds of works of poetry, law and theology, and its economy was prosperous, though it rested heavily on slave labour on plantations around the cities. The caliphate's emirs are still the traditional rulers of much of northern Nigeria.

In the Scramble for Africa, Britain moved from the coast into the interior. George Goldie's trading companies dominated the Niger River, and in 1886 his firm received a royal charter as the Royal Niger Company. A protectorate was proclaimed over the Oil Rivers of the Delta in 1885. Jaja, the former slave who had founded the trading state of Opobo, was lured aboard a British ship in 1887 and exiled for refusing to give up his trade. The Ijebu kingdom was conquered in 1892, and Oyo was bombarded in 1895. In 1897 a British naval expedition, sent after a British party had been ambushed and killed on its way to Benin City, sacked the city, burned the palace and exiled Oba Ovonramwen. The soldiers carried off thousands of brass and ivory works, the Benin Bronzes, which were sold to museums and collectors in Europe and are still the subject of claims for their return. In the east, the Aro were defeated in 1901 and 1902.

In 1900 the British government took over the territories of the Royal Niger Company and created the protectorates of Northern and Southern Nigeria. Frederick Lugard, high commissioner of the north, conquered the caliphate with the West African Frontier Force: Kano fell in February 1903 and Sokoto in March, and the last independent caliph, Attahiru I, was killed at Burmi later that year. Lugard ruled the north through the emirs, a system known as indirect rule, which left Islamic courts and local administration in place and kept Christian missionaries largely out. The name Nigeria had been suggested in 1897 by the journalist Flora Shaw, who later married Lugard.

On 1 January 1914 Lugard amalgamated the north and the south into the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, administered from Lagos. The union was largely one of convenience, as the wealthier south helped pay for the north. During World War I Nigerian troops fought in the conquest of German Kamerun, in modern Cameroon, and in East Africa. Colonial rule brought railways, cocoa farming in the south-west, groundnut and cotton growing in the north and tin mining on the Jos Plateau. In the south-east, where the British imposed warrant chiefs on societies that had never had them, rumours of a tax on women sparked the Women's War of 1929, a mass protest by tens of thousands of Igbo and Ibibio women in which colonial troops killed more than fifty.

Mission schools in the south produced an educated class of lawyers, journalists and clergy. Herbert Macaulay founded the Nigerian National Democratic Party in 1923, and Nnamdi Azikiwe's newspapers spread nationalist ideas. In World War II more than 100,000 Nigerians served in the British forces, many in Burma. After the war, nationalist pressure won a series of constitutions in 1946, 1951 and 1954 that turned Nigeria into a federation of three regions, each dominated by one large group and one party: the Northern People's Congress of Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, in the north; Obafemi Awolowo's Action Group in the Yoruba west; and Azikiwe's National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons in the Igbo-dominated east. Oil was struck at Oloibiri in the Niger Delta in 1956.

Nigeria became independent within the Commonwealth on 1 October 1960, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa, with Abubakar Tafawa Balewa of the Northern People's Congress as prime minister. It became a republic in 1963, with Azikiwe as president. The federation was fragile. The north, larger than the other two regions combined, controlled the federal government, and every census became a fight over seats. A disputed census in 1962 and 1963, a crisis in the Western Region and the violent elections of 1964 and 1965 weakened faith in parliamentary politics.

On 15 January 1966 a group of mostly Igbo army majors, including Chukwuma Nzeogwu, staged a coup in which Balewa, Ahmadu Bello, the Western Region premier Samuel Akintola and other leaders were killed. The coup failed in Lagos, and the army commander, General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi, himself Igbo, took power and abolished the regions. Many northerners saw the coup as an Igbo plot. In July 1966 northern officers carried out a counter-coup in which Ironsi was killed, and Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon became head of state. Later that year mobs in the north killed thousands of Igbo and other easterners, and more than a million fled to the Eastern Region.

Negotiations between Gowon and the eastern military governor, Lieutenant Colonel Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, failed. On 27 May 1967 Gowon divided the country into twelve states, cutting the Eastern Region into three and separating its oil-producing areas from the Igbo heartland. Three days later, on 30 May, Ojukwu declared the independence of the Republic of Biafra. War began in July 1967. Federal forces took the coast, Port Harcourt and the oil fields, encircled Biafra and imposed a blockade that the federal government defended as legitimate warfare and that cut off food to millions of people. Pictures of starving Biafran children shocked the world in 1968, and an airlift by churches and aid agencies flew in supplies by night; the experience led to the founding of Médecins Sans Frontières. Britain and the Soviet Union armed the federal government, while France gave Biafra some support.

Biafra surrendered on 15 January 1970, after Ojukwu had fled into exile. Around 100,000 soldiers died, and estimates of civilian deaths, mostly from starvation and disease, range from about 500,000 to two million. Whether the blockade and the killings amounted to genocide against the Igbo was debated at the time and remains contested. Gowon proclaimed that there was "no victor, no vanquished" and pursued a policy of reconciliation, and there were no mass reprisals, but the war left lasting grievances in the south-east.

The 1970s oil boom made Nigeria one of the world's leading exporters, and it joined OPEC in 1971. Oil money paid for roads, universities and a swollen state, but also fed corruption and neglect of agriculture, while the Delta communities that produced the oil saw little benefit and suffered heavy pollution. Gowon was overthrown in 1975 by General Murtala Mohammed, who was assassinated in a failed coup in February 1976. His deputy, General Olusegun Obasanjo, oversaw a new presidential constitution and in 1979 handed power to an elected civilian, Shehu Shagari, which made Obasanjo unusual among African military rulers.

The Second Republic collapsed amid falling oil prices, corruption and disputed elections, and General Muhammadu Buhari seized power on 31 December 1983. He was himself removed in 1985 by General Ibrahim Babangida, who adopted a structural adjustment programme, created new states, moved the capital to the planned city of Abuja in 1991 and promised a return to democracy. But when the businessman Moshood Abiola appeared to have won the presidential election of 12 June 1993, Babangida annulled the result. After a short-lived interim government, General Sani Abacha took power in November 1993. His rule was the harshest of the military era: Abiola was imprisoned after declaring himself president, opponents were jailed or killed, and in November 1995 the writer and Ogoni activist Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight others were hanged after a trial widely condemned as unfair, leading to Nigeria's suspension from the Commonwealth. Abacha died suddenly in June 1998, Abiola died in custody a month later, and General Abdulsalami Abubakar organised elections.

Obasanjo, now a civilian, was elected president and took office on 29 May 1999. The new democracy survived, though elections were often marred by fraud and violence. Twelve northern states introduced sharia criminal law from 1999 and 2000, provoking religious riots. In the Niger Delta, militant groups attacked oil installations and kidnapped workers until an amnesty in 2009. Umaru Musa Yar'Adua succeeded Obasanjo in 2007 and died in office in 2010, and his vice-president, Goodluck Jonathan from the Delta, became president.

From 2009 the Islamist group known as Boko Haram waged an insurgency in the north-east that killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions; in April 2014 it abducted 276 schoolgirls from Chibok, causing international outrage. In 2015 Buhari returned to power by election, the first time an opposition candidate had defeated a sitting president. Boko Haram split, and its rival faction, the Islamic State West Africa Province, became the stronger force around Lake Chad, while banditry and mass kidnapping spread across the north-west and conflict between herders and farmers killed thousands in the Middle Belt. In October 2020 nationwide protests against police brutality, known as #EndSARS, ended when soldiers opened fire on demonstrators at the Lekki toll gate in Lagos.

Bola Tinubu, a former governor of Lagos State and candidate of the ruling All Progressives Congress, won the election of February 2023 and was sworn in on 29 May 2023. He ended the costly fuel subsidy and let the naira float, measures that drove up prices sharply. In November 2025 the United States government designated Nigeria a country of particular concern over religious freedom, citing killings of Christians; Tinubu's government rejected the charge, and Nigerians and analysts pointed out that the violence claimed victims of all faiths. On 25 December 2025, at the Nigerian government's request, United States forces carried out airstrikes against Islamic State militants in north-western Nigeria, the first foreign military intervention in the country since independence, followed in May 2026 by a joint offensive in the north-east. In December 2025 Nigeria also sent forces to help the government of neighbouring Benin after a coup attempt there. With more than 200 million people, hundreds of languages and a vast cultural influence through its music, film and literature, Nigeria remains the largest and one of the most complex states in Africa.