Nigeria: A Primer

This maybe should have been my first post when I got back to help people along. But better late than never I guess, right? So here goes...

NIGERIA is the the most populous country in Africa and the tenth largest country by population in the world, and is located at the curve of West Africa. As with many of the other nations of Africa, Nigeria's national boundaries result from its colonial history and cut across a number of cultural and physical boundaries. Nigeria has a total area of 923,768 square kilometers, about 60 percent the size of the state of Alaska, and the greatest area of the nations along the coast of West Africa (although in Africa as a whole, it is only the fourteenth largest country by area). The maximum north-south distance within the country is about 1,040 kilometers, while the maximum east-west distance is about 1,120 kilometers. Although it represents only about 3 percent of the surface area of Africa, Nigeria contains about 20 percent of the total African population. In this and other respects, it is arguably the single most important country on the continent.


Nigeria is not even half as large as say Texas, however it has a current population of about 141 million people and alone accounts for about a quarter of the population of Sub-Saharan West Africa. Nigeria has a lot of ethnic groups living in one country and can pretty much be divided into 3 distinct regions by those groups. In the north are the most populous group, the Hausa-Fulani people, a vast majority of whom are Muslim. Other northern ethnic groups are the Tiv, Nupe and Kanuri people. In the southwest are the Yoruba, most of whom are Christian, about a quarter are Muslim and the rest still practice indigenous religions such as Ifa. In the southeast are Ibos/Igbos, who are predominantly Christian and a lot of them are Roman Catholics, although Evangelical Christianity is taking hold of a large segment of the population now. Also in the southeast are the Efik, Ibibio, Annang, and Ijaw ethnic groups.

As you can imagine in a country with so many different ethnic groups, communication can be a problem. To further complicate matters, many of these languages have further sub-dialects that can vary from city to city or state to state. Most people converse in English or a patois version called Pidgin or Broken English in Nigeria. Broken English is essentially a mix of one's native language and English (or native and French if you are in French West Africa). A lot of people can speak more than one language in Nigeria, however the main ethnic languages are Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa.

To give you an idea of how complicated a person's identity can be in Nigeria; I am of Yoruba descent, however my mom is from the Ara Oke (Highland People) of the Yorubas and my dad is of the Ijebu people, who are also considered Yoruba but speak an entirely different and often hard to understand dialect. These are not historically tribes that get along, but my parents married anyway and you can imagine the fuss over that. We kids also had to learn to at least understand two separate dialects of Yoruba which were very different from the Lagosian anglicized dialect we grew up hearing. Chew on that a while...Confused yet?

If you want o read up more on the long, interesting and complicated history and culture of Nigeria, Wikipedia has many exceptional pages that do a great job of the break downs and so on. Go forth and investigate won't you?