Nigeria is a large country in West Africa. On a map, Benin sits to its west and Cameroon to its east. People often call it an oil country, and that is fair — oil is a huge part of its money — though actually many Nigerians never see that wealth in ordinary life. The capital is Abuja, an inland city built for government; the biggest city, and the one you hear in news and songs, is Lagos on the coast. Britain ruled the land for a long time, and Nigeria became its own country in 1960. Older books still print a 2014 population of about 175 million, but the country has grown a great deal since then and is now one of the most populated places in Africa. A tidy first picture is “Muslims mainly in the north, Christians mainly in the south,” and that is a real pattern, though actually the middle of the country is mixed, and there are many peoples and languages, not two neat blocks. English is the official language, left from British rule, but at home people speak Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo and many others.