Content preview - You need a premium account to view this content.

Nigeria: the Black Giant of Africa

Each time I thread my way through the chaos, inefficiency, heat, and bedlam of the airport at Lagos, Nigeria, I find myself wondering if I'll ever make it in one piece and asking myself why I ever left home. Nonetheless, after each visit to Nigeria I feel a warm glow of satisfaction and intense exhilaration. I realize I've been in the most exciting country in Black Africa-a country that pulsates with a beat louder and faster than that of any other on the continent, populated by a people who are exuberant, boisterous, argumentative, and in a hurry. They push, shove, and bicker on the streets, refusing to queue up quietly as do their less combative neighbors in other African countries. Line-ups of motorists at a gasoline station in Lagos not uncommonly degenerate into fisticuffs, as some impatient soul tries to push to the head of the line and is immediately challenged by those already there.

Perhaps one reason why Nigerians are so self-assertive and boisterous is that the country has a long and distinguished history and culture and much to be proud of. Its northern cities, such as Kano, were sophisticated southern anchors on the trans-Saharan caravan routes one thousand years ago. As mentioned previously, when Europeans visited Benin in the fifteenth century, they found a highly organized and advanced people whose artisans produced in ivory, bronze, terra-cotta, and brass works that are recognized today throughout the world as masterpieces.

By all counts, Nigeria is the most important country in Black Africa. Probably one-quarter of all Africans are Nigerian. Although no one knows for certain, since a full census of the country has not been taken since independence in 1960, there are somewhere between 90 million and 110 million inhabitants, more than any country in Western Europe. Nor is Nigeria an economic pygmy. The gross domestic product exceeds that of South Africa, with all of its gold and diamonds, and is more than 50 percent that of all other forty-five sub-Saharan countries of Africa combined.

The country is a melange of over two hundred ethnic groups and many dozens of different languages, but there are three major tribes, which are actually small nations. They include the Hausa and Fulani of northern Nigeria, Islamic people with Arab ties who are great horsemen and whose tribal kings built crenellated palaces of baked mud; the self-confident and entrepreneurial Yoruba in the West; and the Ibos of eastern Nigeria, who under the patronage of the British colonial government became the administrators, educators, and businessmen-the backbone of bureaucracy and commerce in the country. The three major tribes live together in an uneasy union made more complicated and tentative by religious tension between the Muslim north and the Christian-animist south.

Geographically, Nigeria also presents a vast panorama of contrasts. The size of Arizona, Utah, and California combined, its landmass is approximately one-tenth that of the United States. The southern coast, along the Gulf of Guinea, is dominated by mangrove swamps, which give way to rain forest farther inland, with trees reaching as high as 200 feet. The central plateau is characterized by wooded savanna, with the vegetation becoming increasingly sparse as one travels farther north. The northern part of the country is barren, desolate desert, its arid surface swept by the harmattan, the hot, dry wind from the Sahara.