Nigeria

Nigeria: capital Abuja, population 237.5M, area 923,768 km². The 6th most populous country, in Africa. Facts, map, neighbours and more.

Nigeria holds more than 520 native languages, more than any other country in Africa. Its terracotta heads from the Nok culture were being modelled two thousand years ago, and the bronze casters of Benin worked for a royal court for centuries. Lagos, with somewhere between 17 and 21 million people, is the largest urban area on the continent.

• Terracotta sculptures of the Nok culture were first dug up near the village of Nok in 1928, and the people who modelled them had already been working iron.
• The Benin Bronzes are several thousand plaques and figures that lined the royal palace of the Kingdom of Benin, cast by a guild that still keeps its street in Benin City.
• British forces took the Benin Bronzes out of the palace in 1897, and they are now scattered through museums across Europe and North America.
• Sungbo's Eredo, a system of walls and ditches southwest of Ijebu Ode, was raised in honour of a Yoruba noblewoman and runs for tens of kilometres.

• Chinua Achebe published Things Fall Apart in 1958; it went on to become the most widely read, translated and studied African novel there is.
• Wole Soyinka won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1986, writing plays, poems and memoirs out of an Anglican Yoruba childhood in Abeokuta.
• Fela Kuti built Afrobeat by welding West African rhythm to American funk and jazz, stretching single tracks past twenty minutes on record.
• The Guild of Benin Bronze Casters has worked on Igun Street for generations, using the lost-wax method that produced the palace plaques.

• Lagos holds somewhere between 17 and 21 million people, which makes it the largest city in the country and the most populous urban area in Africa.
• Zuma Rock stands 725 metres above sea level beside the road north from Abuja, a single mass of granodiorite from the Precambrian.
• The Osun-Osogbo grove on the banks of the Osun river is among the last of the sacred forests that once bordered most Yoruba cities.
• Igun Street in Benin City is still the working address of the bronze casters' guild, which is why the craft outlived the palace it decorated.

• Nollywood turns out so many films a year that by the mid-2000s it ranked second in the world by output, ahead of the United States and behind only India.
• The industry dates its modern era to one straight-to-video release, Living in Bondage in 1992, and built itself on cassettes rather than cinemas.
• More than 520 native languages are spoken here, with English and French as the official ones and Nigerian Pidgin covering the widest ground of all.
• Nigerian Pidgin is an English-based creole that nobody legislated into being; it simply spread until it had more speakers than any other tongue but English.

What is the capital of Nigeria?

The capital of Nigeria is Abuja.

What is the population of Nigeria?

Nigeria has about 237.5M people — the 6th most populous country in the world.

How big is Nigeria?

Nigeria covers 923,768 km², making it the 31st largest country by area.

Which region is Nigeria in?

Nigeria is in Western Africa, Africa.