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Under the Y's left arm, in the Western Region (pop. 8,000,000), live the most advanced of all Nigerians—the Yoruba tribesmen, who worship 400 different deities, including Shango, god of thunder, and boast a centuries-old tradition of political organization.
Under the right arm of the Y is the heavily forested Eastern Region (pop. 9,000,000), home of the Ibo. a fiercely independent people, half Christian, half pagan, and known, because of their get-up-and-go, as "the Jews of Africa."
Black Africa's first TV station and Nigeria's first university are in the Western capital of Ibadan, where three-quarters of a million people cluster noisily under a sea of tin roofs. Between them, the Yoruba West and bustling Ibo East dominate Nigeria's commerce and furnish most of the country's bureaucrats. But the real weight of the nation rests on the top of the Y. Here, in the Northern Region, live close to 20 million people, mostly Moslems, who still remember the jihad (holy war), in which, 156 years ago, the Fulani horsemen of Imam Othman dan Fodio overwhelmed the original Hausa inhabitants. Though it is still an essentially feudal society in which Hausa-speaking masses are ruled by stern Fulani emirs, the North today, by sheer weight of numbers, controls Nigeria's federal House of Representatives and, in the person of Sir Abubakar, lords it over the bright brats of the South.
To the New World. It was in the North too that Nigeria's written history began—in the walled-caravan center of Kano, whose chronicles date back to A.D. 960 and whose big, modern airport today is one of the world's busiest. For coastal Nigeria the ages passed without written record until the late 15th century, when Portuguese adventurers sailed and marched up the creeks to Benin, whose 16th and 17th century bronzes (some of which depict Portuguese traders) are now among Africa's most treasured art objects. To the Portuguese—and the English who eventually displaced them—Nigeria's most valuable commodity was its people. Between 1562 (when Sir John Hawkins carried Britain's first slave cargo to Haiti) and 1862 (when the last Nigerian was sold in the U.S. South), Nigeria's chiefs sold so many hundreds of thousands of their countrymen into slavery in the New World that Nigeria became known as the Slave Coast.
With slavery's passing and the coming of the Industrial Revolution, Britain's interest in Nigeria shifted from people to palm oil. To get the oil, British trading companies began to penetrate the interior of Nigeria—and after them came the Union Jack. By 1903, when Sir Frederick Lugard (later Lord Lugard) began his campaigns against the Northern emirs, British rule in Nigeria was an accepted international fact. But even yet no one conceived of northern and southern Nigeria as having anything but a geographical connection; the word Nigeria itself was coined by a London Times contributor named Flora Shaw—who later became Lady Lugard. Not until 1914, when Lugard, one of Britain's great colonial administrators, took over as Governor General of both North and South, was modern Nigeria born.