Early States and Kingdoms (c. 900–1800)

From around the end of the first millennium AD, much of what is now Nigeria came to be organised into states and kingdoms, many of which modern peoples trace their history to. The Library of Congress country study names among the early states the Yoruba kingdoms, the Edo kingdom of Benin, the Hausa cities, Nupe and Kanem-Borno, and notes that other states probably existed whose age cannot be dated from oral tradition alone.

In the south-west, Yoruba village compounds began to merge into city-states from about the eleventh century, with Ife as their religious centre and source of royal legitimacy; Ife is famous for its sculpture. In the fifteenth century Oyo and Benin overtook Ife as political and economic powers. Oyo, in the savanna, drew its strength from cavalry; Benin, ruled by an oba advised by hereditary chiefs, built a centralised state, was in contact with Portugal by the late fifteenth century, and at its height in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reached into parts of Yorubaland and the western Igbo area.

In the south-east, most scholars long described Igbo society as "stateless", organised in self-governing village groups. The country study points out the limits of that view: the bronzes of Igbo-Ukwu show a rich material culture in the heart of Igboland about the eighth century AD (Wikipedia gives the ninth), and the Nri kingdom, remembered as the cradle of Igbo culture, appears to have flourished before the seventeenth century.

In the north, trade across the Sahara shaped state formation. Kanem, east of Lake Chad, had become an empire by the thirteenth century; its rulers accepted Islam in the eleventh century, and Borno, its western province, became independent in the late fourteenth century, where the Kanuri emerged as a people. By the eleventh century some Hausa states, such as Kano, Katsina and Gobir, were walled trading towns; Hausa tradition traces their rulers to a founding hero, Bayajidda (spelt Bayinjida in the country study), who became king of Daura. Islam spread along the caravan routes, and Fulani herders entered Hausaland from the thirteenth century.

In the sixteenth century much of the north paid tribute to Songhai or to Borno, which reached its height under Mai Idris Aloma (about 1569–1600) and dominated the region for two centuries until drought and rivalry weakened it in the eighteenth century.