History of Nigeria

Iron Age sculptors, bronze-casting kingdoms, an amalgamation drawn up by a British governor, and Africa's most populous nation

Nigeria's history did not begin with the line a British governor drew on a map in 1914. Long before that, ironworkers on the Jos Plateau cast the earliest sculpture in sub-Saharan Africa, the city of Ife produced bronze heads so refined that European scholars refused to believe Africans had made them, and the Benin Empire ran a court bronze-casting guild for four centuries. Hausa city-states and the Islamic empire of Kanem-Bornu built trans-Saharan trade networks in the north while the Oyo Empire's cavalry dominated the southwest and fed the Atlantic slave trade at the coast. The 19th century brought the Sokoto Caliphate's jihad and then British conquest, an 1914 amalgamation of two very different colonial territories into one Nigeria, and a 1960 independence that gave way within six years to coup, countercoup, and a civil war over Biafra that killed as many as two million people, mostly children, through blockade and famine. What follows is decades of military rule, an oil economy that made Nigeria rich and unequal at once, and a return to democracy in 1999 that has now lasted longer than any prior civilian government in the country's history.