Nigeria’s ancient indigenous traditions continue to adapt and survive, though they also continue to be challenged by religious and political forces that seek to diminish their power. There are countless of these traditions in Nigeria, but the number of practitioners is difficult to determine, and is probably underestimated because religious identity numbers do not account for the many Nigerians who claim multiple religious identities.

The theology of these religious systems include an emphasis on ancestor worship and a veneration of primordial spirits, the supernatural...

The Jama’tu Nasril Islam (“Group for the Victory of Islam”) was founded in 1962 by a coalition of Muslim leaders in northern Nigeria, and served as an umbrella organization for a variety of Muslim groups and interests. The goal of the organization was to unify northern Muslims and to promote their interests in the wake of independence and the formation of the first Nigerian Republic. Following the assassination of Ahmadu Bello, a prominent northern Muslim politician and descendent of Usman Dan Fodio, the...

Ken Saro-Wiwa was a prominent Ogoni environmental activist in Nigeria’s southern delta region, hanged in 1995 by the Sani Abacha government on exaggerated charges along with eight other activists. Saro-Wiwa was a co-founder of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), which directly challenged the rise of international oil corporations in the delta—particularly Shell—and the expansive corruption that oil wealth facilitated.

MOSOP called for $10 billion for royalties and compensation from Shell for the Ogoni land where they drilled, for the environmental...

The Maitatsine riots were a series of violent uprisings instigated by Islamist militants in northern Nigeria between 1980 and 1985 and represented northern Nigeria’s first major wave of religiously-inspired violence. The riots prompted immense ethnoreligious discord between Muslims and Christians in years to come.

The Maitatsine movement was led by Muhammadu Marwa (d. 1980), a Cameroonian residing in Kano who opposed the Nigerian state (Maitatsine is a Hausa term for “He who damns,” referring to Marwa). He referred to himself as a prophet—to the extent that one...