Nigeria

Hello everyone!

Nigeria, which is officially the Federal Rebublic of Nigeria, is a federal constitutional republic comprising 36 states and its Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. Its coast in the south lies on the Gulf of Guinea on the Atlantic Ocean. Nigeria is located in West Africa and shares lan borders with Niger, in the north, the Republic of Benin, in the west, and Cameroon and Chad, in the east.

Moreover, there are three ethnic groups, which are the most influencial and largest: the Hausa, in the north; Igbo, chiefly in the southeast; and Yoruba, which is found predominantly in Nigeria and make up around 21% of its population.

Actually, the first European "explorers" were Spanish and Portuguese. They began trading with ethnicities of the coast and negotiating a trade slaves. Subsequently, Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and, after the Napoleonic Wars, established the West Africa Squadron in order to stop the international traffic of African slaves. Many years later, exactly in 1885, British demand to a West African sphere of ingluence acquired international recognition and ,one year later, the Royal Niger Company chartered under the leadership of Sir George Taubman Goldie. Afterwards, the company's territory became under the controle of the British Goverment in 1900. Finally, in 1901, Nigeria came to be a British protectorate and part of the British Empire.

On the other hand, the Niger area formally became part of the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria, and Nigeria went on being divided into the northern, where slavery was not abolished until 1936, and southern provinces and Lagos Colony. 

Thereafter the World War II, due to the growth of Nigerian nationalism and demands for independence, consecutive constitutions, which was legislated by Britain, moved Nigeria towar self-government on a representative federal basis. As a result of the grate wave for independence of Africa, Nigeria got its independece from the United Kingdom in 1960 and created a government consolidated by convervative parties: the Nigerian People's Congress (NPC), the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons (NCNC).

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