Nigeria's deep history begins with one of the oldest and most mysterious civilisations of Africa south of the Sahara: the Nok culture. It takes its name from the mining village of Nok, on today's central plateau, where in 1928, during tin mining, the first terracotta figures turned up by chance. This culture flourished roughly between 1500 BC and AD 500, and its hallmark is its extraordinary clay sculpture: human heads and figures with pierced triangular eyes and elaborate hairstyles, the oldest known figurative art in sub-Saharan Africa.
The Nok were not only artists. They were also among the first peoples in the region to master iron metallurgy: iron-smelting furnaces dated to several centuries BC have been found at their sites, among the oldest on the continent. Strikingly, they seem to have gone straight from stone tools to iron, with no intermediate copper or bronze stage, a technological leap that is rare in human history.
Long before the Nok, hunter-gatherers already lived in these savannahs and forests, and later came farmers who domesticated yams and other tropical crops. From those roots, over the millennia, would emerge the great peoples who still define Nigeria today: the Hausa and the Kanuri in the north, the Yoruba in the southwest, the Igbo in the southeast and dozens of other communities. The Nok culture is the link connecting that prehistory with the civilisations to come.
Centuries after the Nok, societies arose in the south of present-day Nigeria that reached astonishing artistic heights. At Igbo-Ukwu, in the Igbo southeast, archaeologists found a set of bronze objects of extraordinary sophistication —ritual vessels, adornments and ornaments cast using the lost-wax technique— dated to around the 9th and 10th centuries. That a community produced such refined pieces more than a thousand years ago forced a rewrite of what was believed about African metalworking.
In the southwest, the Yoruba city of Ile-Ife became, between the 12th and 15th centuries, a spiritual and artistic centre of the first rank. For the Yoruba, Ife is the place where the god Oduduwa created the world and from which their royal dynasties descend. There, anonymous masters modelled heads in bronze, brass and terracotta of such perfect naturalism that, when they reached Europe in the early 20th century, some refused to believe they were African work. Today they are recognised as one of the summits of world art.
From Ife radiated the model of sacred kingship later adopted by other Yoruba kingdoms and by the Kingdom of Benin itself. These forest civilisations —Igbo, Yoruba, Edo— show that, long before any European contact, southern Nigeria was a mosaic of urban, trading and creative societies, connected by routes that carried salt, copper, ivory and kola nuts from one end of West Africa to the other.
Between the Middle Ages and the 19th century, Nigerian territory was home to some of the most powerful states in Africa. In the northeast, by Lake Chad, the Kanem-Bornu Empire lasted close to a thousand years, one of the longest-lived kingdoms in history. Its rulers, the mai, adopted Islam very early and controlled the trans-Saharan routes along which salt, horses and slaves moved; under Idris Alooma, in the late 16th century, Bornu reached its military and diplomatic peak.
West of Bornu, the Hausa city-states prospered —Kano, Katsina, Zazzau (Zaria), Gobir, Rano and others—, walled trading cities that lived off trans-Saharan commerce and the manufacture of textiles and leather. Further south, in Yoruba country, the Oyo Empire became a formidable power in the 17th and 18th centuries thanks to its cavalry, and its alaafin came to dominate much of the southwest and to collect tribute as far as the Kingdom of Dahomey. And in the forest to the east, the Kingdom of Benin —ruled by the oba of the Edo people— built a capital surrounded by gigantic moats and earthen walls, and sponsored the casters of the Igun guild, makers of the famous Benin Bronzes: plaques and sculptures that told the history of the court in metal.
They were neither idyllic nor static kingdoms: they waged war on each other, traded slaves, allied and betrayed. But they disprove forever the old prejudice of an Africa "without history". When Europeans began to appear on these coasts, they found not empty lands but organised states, with armies, bureaucracies, markets and an art that today is displayed —and claimed back— in the great museums of the world.
In the early 19th century, northern Nigeria went through a revolution that would change its face for ever. In 1804, the Fulani scholar and preacher Usman dan Fodio, outraged by what he saw as the corruption and paganism of the Hausa kings, proclaimed a jihad, a holy war, from the city of Gobir. Rallying discontented Fulani and Hausa, within a few years he defeated most of the Hausa monarchies and replaced them with emirs who swore obedience to him.
From that revolution the Sokoto Caliphate was born, and by around 1815 it had become the largest state in sub-Saharan Africa of its time: a confederation of emirates covering almost all of what is now northern Nigeria and stretching into Niger and Cameroon. Sokoto was not only a political power but a great centre of Islamic learning, with schools, judges and an intellectual output in Arabic and Hausa that is still studied. The only major kingdom that successfully resisted was Kanem-Bornu, whose forces, led by the scholar Al-Kanemi, halted the advance of the jihad.
Sokoto's legacy is enormous. It established Islam as the majority religion of the north, spread Fulani-Hausa language and culture, and created a structure of emirates that the British, decades later, would use to govern indirectly. When the British took the city of Sokoto in 1903 and ended the caliphate's independence, they did not erase its heritage: the emirs remained —and remain— traditional and religious authorities of enormous weight in northern Nigeria.
While empires rose in the interior, the coast of the Gulf of Guinea was caught, from the 16th century onwards, in one of the greatest tragedies in history: the Atlantic slave trade. The coastline of present-day Nigeria was split into two great stretches that Europeans named, without euphemism, after their trade: the Bight of Benin, with ports such as Lagos and Badagry, and the Bight of Biafra (now also called the Bight of Bonny), with Calabar, Bonny and Brass in the maze of channels of the Niger Delta.
For more than three centuries, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children captured in the interior —often in wars fuelled by European demand itself— were marched in chains to those coasts and shipped to the Americas. From these ports alone, around one and a half million enslaved people departed, many of them bound for Brazil, the Caribbean and the British colonies. Certain local kingdoms and traders took an active part in the business, exchanging captives for firearms, alcohol, textiles and cowries; it is a past that must be named precisely, without hiding responsibility on any side.
That trade left deep scars and also human legacies: much of the African diaspora in the Americas —in Brazil, Cuba, Haiti or the United States— has Yoruba, Igbo or Edo roots, and with those people travelled religions such as Candomblé and Santería, heirs to the orishas of these lands. When Britain abolished the trade in 1807 and began to pursue it, its navy used the anti-slavery fight as one of its arguments for intervening on the Nigerian coast, the first step of a presence that would end in conquest.
The British conquest of Nigeria was gradual and came from the coast. In 1851, the Royal Navy bombarded Lagos on the pretext of fighting the slave trade and backing an allied king, and in 1861 it annexed the island outright, making it a colony. From there, and from the Niger Delta, the advance never stopped: the Royal Niger Company, a firm with almost sovereign powers, signed treaties and occupied territory upriver, while military expeditions subdued one kingdom after another. In 1897, a British "punitive expedition" razed Benin City, burned the royal palace and looted the thousands of bronzes that remain in European museums today, and in 1903 the Sokoto Caliphate finally fell.
To administer such a mosaic, the British created two separate protectorates —Northern and Southern—, with very different styles of government: in the Muslim north they applied "indirect rule", leaving the emirs in power; in the south, more diverse and Christianised by missionaries, they intervened more directly. The name "Nigeria", derived from the Niger River, was coined by the journalist Flora Shaw, future wife of the administrator Frederick Lugard.
On 1 January 1914, that same Lugard merged both protectorates into a single Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. The reason was above all financial: the prosperous south was to cover the north's deficit. So a country was born, by decision of an empire and not of its peoples, that forcibly brought together the Hausa-Fulani, Yoruba, Igbo and hundreds of other communities, with very different religions, languages and political traditions. That artificial unification gave Nigeria its enormous diversity, but it also sowed tensions between north and south that would mark the entire century that followed.
After the Second World War, Nigerian nationalism grew strongly, led by figures such as Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello. On 1 October 1960, Nigeria gained independence within the Commonwealth, with Abubakar Tafawa Balewa as prime minister and Azikiwe as the first governor-general; in 1963 it became a republic. But the young democracy, strained by the regional and ethnic rivalries inherited from colonial rule, did not last long.
In January 1966, a military coup by mostly Igbo officers overthrew and killed Balewa and other leaders; in July, a northern counter-coup brought General Yakubu Gowon to power. The wave of killings of Igbo people in the north precipitated the break: on 30 May 1967, Colonel Odumegwu Ojukwu declared the independence of the Republic of Biafra in the southeast, and civil war broke out. The conflict, from 1967 to 1970, ended with Biafra's reintegration, but at an appalling human cost: an estimated one to three million people died, most of them from the famine caused by the blockade. The images of starving Biafran children moved the world and are an indelible part of Nigerian memory; it is remembered soberly, as a national wound.
Oil, discovered in the Niger Delta in 1956, turned the country into a major exporter and filled the state's coffers, but it also fed corruption and an endless succession of coups and military regimes: Gowon, Murtala Mohammed, Olusegun Obasanjo, Muhammadu Buhari, Ibrahim Babangida. There was a brief civilian interlude —the Second Republic (1979-1983)— and then the darkest dictatorship, that of Sani Abacha (1993-1998), which annulled the 1993 election won by Moshood Abiola and in 1995 executed the writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa along with eight other Ogoni men protesting against oil pollution. Abacha's death in 1998 finally opened the way back.
On 29 May 1999, with the inauguration of Olusegun Obasanjo —this time elected at the ballot box—, Nigeria launched the Fourth Republic and ended almost three decades of military dominance. Since then, despite disputed elections and tense handovers, the country has kept an uninterrupted civilian government: Obasanjo, Umaru Yar'Adua, Goodluck Jonathan, Muhammadu Buhari and, since 2023, Bola Tinubu have governed. The federal structure today brings together 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory, whose seat, Abuja, replaced Lagos as the capital in 1991.
Nigeria is Africa's demographic and cultural giant: with more than two hundred and thirty million people it is, by a huge margin, the most populous country on the continent, a very young and urban nation. Its creative energy is global: Nollywood, the film industry based in Lagos, is one of the biggest producers of films in the world, and afrobeats —a distant heir to the afrobeat invented by Fela Kuti— has filled the global charts through artists such as Burna Boy, Wizkid, Davido or Tems. Nigerian literature, from Chinua Achebe and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is among the most influential in the English language.
None of this hides the challenges, which Nigeria faces without sugar-coating. The economy depends too heavily on oil and coexists with enormous poverty and inequality; corruption is still a drag. And security is a real concern in several regions: the jihadist insurgency of Boko Haram and its offshoots in the northeast —with episodes such as the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014—, land conflicts in the centre and banditry in the northwest put the state to the test; they are best treated soberly, without generalising about such a vast country. Even so, Nigeria remains the strongest-beating heart of West Africa: diverse, loud, ambitious and impossible to ignore.
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Unlike almost every other Nigerian city, Abuja has no thousand-year past: it is a capital designed and built on purpose in the second half of the 20th century. The decision to create it was taken in 1976. The military government wanted a new capital in the geographic centre of the country, on ethnically and religiously neutral ground, to take the pressure off overcrowded Lagos without favouring either the north or the south.
On land until then inhabited mainly by Gbagyi (Gwari) communities, a modern city was laid out from nothing, with wide avenues, orderly neighbourhoods and large government buildings. In 1991 Abuja officially replaced Lagos as the capital of Nigeria. Today, at the heart of the Federal Capital Territory, it is home to the presidency, the National Assembly and the embassies. The famous Aso Rock towers over the city.
Abuja is a different Nigeria: greener, more planned and calmer than the rest of the country. Its symbols are meant to represent the whole nation, like the great National Mosque and the National Cathedral, which stand almost facing each other as an image of coexistence between the Islam of the north and the Christianity of the south. It is a comfortable base for exploring the centre of the country.
At the gates of Abuja, beside the road from Kaduna, stands one of Nigeria's most imposing monoliths: Zuma Rock, a mass of granite and gabbro that rises more than 700 metres above the surrounding plain. With its sheer silhouette and a face that popular imagination reads as a human one, it has become a kind of symbolic gateway to the capital.
The rock was a place of spiritual and strategic importance for the Gbagyi people, the area's ancestral inhabitants, who also used it as a refuge in times of war. Today it is one of the country's most famous natural landmarks. It even appears on the 100 naira note, which makes it instantly recognisable to any Nigerian.
Although it is often linked with Abuja because it is so close, Zuma Rock technically lies in neighbouring Niger State. It marks the way into the centre of the country and is a must-stop for anyone travelling to the capital: seeing it rise suddenly on the horizon is one of those images that sum up the scale and beauty of the Nigerian landscape.
Central Nigeria, known as the Middle Belt, is a region of transition between the Sahelian north and the forested south. It has rolling savannahs, rivers and a remarkable variety of peoples who belong to neither the large northern groups nor the southern ones. It is also where the country's two great rivers, the Niger and the Benue, meet at Lokoja, a key point in colonial history and in the origin of Nigeria's own name.
In Niger State, just over an hour from Abuja, the Gurara River plunges over a wide curtain of water: Gurara Falls. Their name combines that of the Gbagyi (Gwari) people with that of the river, and tradition dates their formal "discovery" to the mid-18th century. In the rainy season, when the river rises, the falls become a powerful spectacle, with pools at the base where you can cool off.
Gurara has become one of the favourite weekend getaways for people living in Abuja. All around it, the Middle Belt offers a fascinating cultural mosaic. It also reflects the tensions of present-day Nigeria, having seen conflicts over land between farmers and herders. In every sense, it is a central region for understanding the country.
Lagos was born in a lagoon. Its original core is an island the Awori Yoruba called Eko, inhabited for centuries and for a time under the influence of the Kingdom of Benin. The Portuguese, who arrived in the 15th century, named it "Lagos" —lagoons— for its landscape of marshes and channels, and over time the city became a busy port, including in the slave trade.
In 1851 the Royal Navy bombarded Lagos and in 1861 annexed it as a colony, the first stronghold of the future Nigeria. From then on it never stopped growing: it was the colonial capital and, after 1960, capital of the independent nation, until in 1991 the government moved the capital to Abuja. Losing the title did not slow it down: today Lagos is the most populous city in sub-Saharan Africa, a metropolis of more than twenty million people in its urban area, divided between the skyscraper islands —Lagos Island, Victoria Island, Ikoyi— and a mainland that stretches on endlessly.
Chaotic, loud and unstoppable, Lagos is Nigeria's economic engine and its cultural capital: this is where Nollywood and the afrobeats scene now heard around the world have their pulse. It is a city of brutal contrasts, where the wealth of the islands sits alongside huge informal settlements such as Makoko, the "floating village" built on stilts in the lagoon. Nobody leaves Lagos indifferent.
West of Lagos, on the coast facing the Atlantic, the town of Badagry holds one of Nigeria's most painful memories. In the 18th and 19th centuries it was one of the main ports of the Atlantic slave trade on the Bight of Benin: thousands of captives brought from the interior left its beaches in chains, shipped to Brazil, the Caribbean and North America.
Today Badagry preserves that past as a place of remembrance. You can visit old slave warehouses and museums with shackles and objects from the trade, and walk the path leading to the shore known as "the Point of No Return", the spot from which the enslaved lost sight of their land for ever. It is a pilgrimage site for many members of the African diaspora searching for their roots.
Badagry also has a place on the other side of history: it was one of the first gateways for Christianity and Western education in Nigeria. The country's first Christian sermon was preached there in 1842 and one of its first churches was built, and the town preserves what is considered Nigeria's first two-storey building. Slave trade and mission, slavery and modernity live side by side in the memory of this coastal town.
Inland, in Ogun State, stands Abeokuta, whose name means "under the rock" in Yoruba. The city was founded around 1830, when various Egba groups, fleeing the wars that ravaged Yoruba country after the fall of the Oyo Empire, took refuge among the caves and crags of Olumo Rock, a huge granite outcrop that served them as a natural fortress.
From the top of Olumo, the Egba held off attacks from the neighbouring Kingdom of Dahomey and built a city-state of their own. Today the rock is the symbol of Abeokuta: you climb its steps and passages among traditional shrines and centuries-old trees to a viewpoint overlooking the sea of zinc roofs below. It is still a sacred place, watched over by priestesses of the Yoruba religion.
Abeokuta is also the birthplace of an extraordinary part of modern Nigeria. From here came former president and general Olusegun Obasanjo, Nobel Prize in Literature winner Wole Soyinka, the legendary musician Fela Kuti —inventor of afrobeat— and his mother, the activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, a pioneer of Nigerian feminism. Few cities in the country have produced so many decisive figures.
In Ondo State, an imposing massif of granite inselbergs (hills of bare rock that rise straight out of the plain) is home to one of Nigeria's most unusual cultural landscapes: the Idanre Hills. For centuries, the Idanre community lived high up on these mountains rather than at their foot, in an ancient settlement that could only be reached by climbing hundreds of steps carved into the rock.
This Old Idanre, the old town on the heights, was continuously inhabited for some eight hundred years. In the early 20th century its people gradually moved down to the plain in search of land and services. They left behind, almost intact, the king's palace, temples, royal tombs and stone houses. Today these are protected as heritage and are on the tentative list for World Heritage status.
Climbing up to Idanre by its famous 660 steps, past caves, viewpoints and trees, is one of the outings Nigerians themselves love most. At the top the air is cooler, and the view of the inselbergs against the sky shows why for centuries this place was a refuge, a fortress and the home of an entire people.
Osun State, in the southwest, is the spiritual core of Yoruba civilisation. Close by lies Ile-Ife, the city that tradition holds to be the place where the god Oduduwa created the world, and from which all the Yoruba royal dynasties descend. The religion of the orishas, the art of the Ife bronzes and the model of sacred kingship later adopted by the other Yoruba kingdoms all spread out from here.
This is a land of kingdoms with intertwined histories: the Ijesha, the Ife, the Oyo. Traditional Yoruba beliefs survive here with particular strength, along with their pantheon of orishas, among them Sango, Ogun, Osun and Obatala. These gods crossed the Atlantic with enslaved people and became Brazilian Candomblé and Cuban Santería. Few regions of Africa keep such a living link between their ancestral religion and a diaspora of millions in the Americas.
Osun pairs that spiritual heritage with generous nature: hills, rivers and forests. Its two great attractions, the Osun-Osogbo sacred grove and the Erin-Ijesha waterfalls, sum up its character well. For the Yoruba, these are places where the sacred and the natural are one and the same.
On the banks of the Osun River, beside the city of Osogbo, one of the last sacred groves of the Yoruba religion survives: Osun-Osogbo, declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2005. Within its nearly 75 hectares of forest stand shrines, sculptures and temples dedicated to Osun, goddess of fertility and water, and to other gods of the Yoruba pantheon.
The grove came close to disappearing, and it was saved by an unexpected person. Susanne Wenger, an Austrian artist, arrived in Nigeria in the mid-20th century, converted to the Yoruba religion and devoted her life to restoring the shrines. Working with local artisans, she also filled the forest with new, monumental sculptures. Thanks to this "New Sacred Art" movement, Osun-Osogbo is today a living open-air museum and a fully active shrine.
Every August the grove hosts the Osun-Osogbo festival, one of the largest traditional religious celebrations in Africa. For two weeks, hundreds of thousands of worshippers and visitors, many of them from the diaspora in the Americas, follow the Arugba priestess. In a huge procession she carries the offerings to the river, renewing the pact between the city and its goddess.
In Ijesha country, in the northeast of Osun State, water tumbles out of the forest to form one of Nigeria's best-loved waterfalls: the Erin-Ijesha falls, also known as Olumirin. What sets them apart is that they don't fall in a single drop. Instead they descend through seven stepped levels, each with its own pool to swim in.
Local tradition links their discovery to the founding of the town of Erin-Ijesha in ancient times and gives them an almost magical aura. According to the stories, "Olumirin" is the name of a being or spirit associated with the place. Legend aside, climbing from pool to pool to reach the highest levels, scrambling over wet rocks and through tropical vegetation, has become one of Nigerians' favourite nature and adventure trips.
The falls are also an example of the country's growing domestic tourism. At weekends, families, young people and hikers from Lagos, Ibadan and other cities come to cool off in the water. In a region so shaped by the sacred, Erin-Ijesha shows the other face of the Yoruba southwest: the simple enjoyment of a splendid landscape.
For centuries Benin City was the capital of one of Africa's most sophisticated states: the Kingdom of Benin, ruled by the obas of the Edo people from around the 13th century. At its height the city was surrounded by a system of moats and earthen walls so vast that it ranks among the largest earthworks built anywhere before the machine age. Its court dazzled the first Portuguese travellers with its order and grandeur.
Benin's worldwide fame comes from its art. On Igun Street, the casters of the royal guild worked bronze and brass using the lost-wax technique. They created plaques and sculptures that told the story of the court in metal: the famous Benin Bronzes. That golden age ended abruptly in 1897, when a British military expedition destroyed and burned the city, exiled the oba and looted thousands of bronzes. Many of them are still scattered across museums in Europe and North America. The campaign for their return is now one of Africa's great cultural causes, and Benin is building a new museum to receive them.
The city is still alive and proud of its heritage. On Igun Street, artisans descended from those master casters still cast bronze as they did centuries ago, and the Edo monarchy and its oba carry enormous symbolic weight. Benin City, capital of present-day Edo State, is essential for understanding the historical depth of Nigeria.
In the far southeast, on a river flowing into the Bight of Biafra, the city of Calabar has one of the densest histories in Nigeria. Home to the Efik people, in the 18th and 19th centuries it was one of the largest slave ports in West Africa. Tens of thousands of captives left from Old Calabar, in a trade run by powerful local merchant houses that dealt with European captains as equals.
When Britain abolished the slave trade, Calabar switched to trading palm oil and became a gateway for missionaries and Western education. The Scottish missionary Mary Slessor carried out her work here and is remembered for fighting the custom of killing twins, who were seen as a bad omen. In the late 19th century Calabar became the capital of the British Oil Rivers and Niger Coast protectorates, the forerunners of colonial Nigeria.
Today Calabar is known as one of the cleanest, calmest and most orderly cities in the country. Its big event is the Calabar Carnival, held every December and billed as Africa's biggest street party, with floats, troupes and music filling the city with colour. Museums such as the one in the old colonial residence tell the story of its slave-trading past without glossing over it.
Cross River State, on the border with Cameroon, holds one of West Africa's natural treasures: Cross River National Park, one of the largest areas of primary rainforest left in the region. It is an ancient humid forest with extraordinary biodiversity and very high levels of endemism, and it is considered one of the continent's conservation hotspots.
Its most emblematic and fragile inhabitant is the Cross River gorilla, the most endangered gorilla subspecies on the planet. Only a few hundred remain, split between Nigeria and Cameroon, and these forests are one of their last refuges. They share the forest with chimpanzees, drills (a rare and spectacular primate), forest elephants and an astonishing variety of birds, butterflies and plants.
Protecting this ecosystem is a huge challenge in the face of logging, hunting and pressure on land. Conservation and responsible tourism projects aim to give local communities a reason to value the living forest more than its destruction. Cross River stands for the green, biodiverse Nigeria that is usually left out of the story of the oil-producing country.
In the north of Cross River State, near the border with Cameroon, a plateau more than 1,500 metres high offers something that surprises anyone who pictures Nigeria only as hot, tropical land: a cool climate of mists and highland grasslands. This is the Obudu Plateau, home to the Obudu Mountain Resort, formerly known as the Obudu Cattle Ranch.
The site was set up in the early 1950s by Scottish settlers who found that these heights, with their mild climate, were ideal for raising cattle, very different from the stifling lowlands. Over time the ranch became a mountain resort that uses the setting of waterfalls, meadows and cloud forest to draw visitors looking for fresh air and nature.
Its most famous attraction is the Obudu cable car, one of the longest of its kind, which climbs from the base to the top of the plateau with spectacular views over the forest. Obudu is one of Nigeria's favourite highland getaways and shows once again the surprising variety of landscapes that fit inside a single country.
In the geographic heart of Nigeria rises the Jos Plateau. Thanks to its altitude, it has a mild, pleasant climate all year round, very different from the heat in the rest of the country. That mild climate made it a place Europeans valued in colonial times, and the ground beneath it also hid a resource that shaped its history: tin.
Tin mining made the city of Jos grow during the first half of the 20th century and drew workers from all over the country, giving it an exceptionally diverse population. It is no coincidence that it was on this very plateau, in the village of Nok, that mining work in 1928 uncovered the first terracottas of the ancient Nok culture. Beneath the soil of Jos lies one of the oldest records of African civilisation.
Today Jos, capital of Plateau State, is a gateway to landscapes of rocks, hills and granite outcrops found nowhere else in the country, and home to museums that look after the Nok legacy. Its ethnic and religious diversity was once its wealth. In recent decades it has also made the city a scene of tension and outbreaks of violence between communities, and Jos is working to rebuild coexistence.
In Bauchi State, in the north-east, lies Yankari National Park, considered the best wildlife reserve in Nigeria and one of the most important in West Africa. Originally created as a game reserve in the mid-20th century and later upgraded to a national park, it protects a wide wooded savannah where some of the country's most significant populations of large animals survive.
Yankari is famous above all for its elephants, which form one of the largest herds left in the region, as well as for its buffalo, baboons, antelopes, hippos and rich birdlife. Driving its tracks on a safari is the best chance to see wild animals roaming free in Nigeria, a country whose image tends to be shaped more by its cities and its oil than by its nature.
The park's unexpected gem is Wikki Warm Spring, a crystal-clear, warm thermal spring that wells up from the ground and where visitors can swim all year round, even at night. Like so many protected areas in Africa, Yankari faces the threat of poaching and human pressure, and its conservation is key to the future of Nigeria's wildlife.
Kano is the great historic city of northern Nigeria and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in West Africa. Its origins go back more than a thousand years, around Dala Hill, and for centuries it was one of the leading Hausa city-states: a hub of trans-Saharan trade where salt, horses and books came in from the north, and leather, dyed textiles and gold went out from the south.
Old Kano keeps traces of that greatness: the remains of its huge mud walls, which once surrounded the entire city; the maze-like Kurmi Market, in business since the 15th century; and, above all, the Kofar Mata indigo dye pits, in operation since 1498 and considered the oldest still working in Africa, where dyers dip cloth into the classic Hausa indigo blue. Kano was an emirate of the Sokoto Caliphate and remains a major centre of Nigerian Islam, with its emir a traditional authority of enormous prestige.
Today Kano is the largest city in the north and its commercial and industrial capital. In the 20th century it became famous for its "groundnut pyramids", mountains of peanut sacks ready for export that symbolised the region's agricultural wealth. Densely populated and deeply Muslim, Kano is the gateway to Nigeria's Sahelian world: a universe of mosques, markets and centuries of history that beats to the rhythm of the Sahara.
Hardly anything that happened to Nigeria happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
