Nigeria

Nigeria is the giant of Africa: with some 230 million people, it is by far the most populous country on the continent and one of the most populous in the world. On the Gulf of Guinea, around the great river that gives it its name, the Niger, it is a country bursting with energy, whose megacity, Lagos, is one of the most dynamic cities on the planet. The political capital, Abuja, was built in the centre of the country so as to belong to none of its major peoples.

The land slopes gently from north to south. In the north lies the dry savanna of the Sahel, on the edge of the desert, a land of herding and old trading cities. Further south the vegetation thickens into the humid rainforests of the south and the vast Niger Delta, a maze of mangroves and channels running into the ocean, which holds the country's oil, the source of its wealth and of its troubles. Between the two, broad plateaus fill the centre.

Nigeria has more than two hundred and fifty peoples, three of them dominant. In the north are the Hausa and the Fulani, Muslims, heirs to powerful trading cities and to the Sokoto Caliphate. In the southwest are the Yoruba, builders of kingdoms and of a refined art. In the southeast are the Igbo, known for their entrepreneurial spirit. Much earlier, the Nok culture was already making terracotta sculptures two and a half thousand years ago, and the kingdom of Benin later cast bronzes admired around the world. Joined together by British colonial rule in 1914, these peoples have formed one nation since 1960, not without tension: the Biafran War (1967–1970) killed more than a million people.

About five hundred languages are spoken in Nigeria, making it one of the world's great language hotspots. English, inherited from colonial rule, is the official and shared language, alongside the three main languages, Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo. The country is split almost in two by religion: a Muslim north and a Christian south, roughly equal in size, on an old base of traditional beliefs that is still alive, including the rich Yoruba cosmology, which travelled to the Americas with the slave trade.

Nigeria is now a cultural power. Its film industry, Nollywood, is the second largest in the world by number of films. Its music, from Fela Kuti's militant Afrobeat to the Afrobeats of today's stars (Burna Boy, Wizkid), is heard all over the world. At the table, the dish everyone shares is jollof rice, a spicy, colourful rice whose best version neighbouring Ghana disputes.