Nigerian

Nigerian covers the Volta-Niger branch of Niger-Congo, once classed as the East Kwa languages: Yoruba and Igala of the Yoruboid group, Edo, Igbo, the Nupoid speech of Nupe and Gbari, and Idoma, all tonal tongues of southern Nigeria. Its oldest urban centre was Ile-Ife, a Yoruba city-state by the fifth century BCE whose Ife Empire flourished from 1200 to about 1420 and produced naturalistic brass and terracotta sculpture. In the fifteenth century the warlike Oyo Empire, ruled by the Alaafin from Oyo-Ile, displaced Ife as the leading Yoruba power and made Dahomey its tributary; under Fulani pressure and civil war Oyo collapsed after 1800, and Egba refugees founded Abeokuta in 1830.

Benin's Edo speakers traced their state to the Ogiso kings of Igodomigodo around 900 and to the Ife prince Oranmiyan, who introduced the title Oba; Oba Ewuare, from 1440, enlarged the kingdom and fortified its capital Edo, the Portuguese arrived in 1485, and Oba Esigie repelled an Igala invasion early in the next century while royal casters made the Benin Bronzes. The Igbo lived in republican village assemblies under the priest-kings of Nri, and Igbo-Ukwu has yielded ninth-century bronzes; the Aro Confederacy of Arochukwu later sold Igbo captives to the ships of the Bight of Biafra. On the Niger and Kaduna rivers the Nupe kingdom arose in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries under Tsoede, titled Etsu; its ruler adopted Islam about 1770, and the Sokoto jihad overran it in the 1800s, installing a Fulani dynasty at Bida.