Religion and History in Nigeria

Nigeria is almost evenly split between Christians and Muslims, each estimated at roughly 45 to 50 percent per most estimates including Pew Research's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, a division that broadly though imperfectly tracks a north-south geographic line, with the mostly Hausa-Fulani north predominantly Muslim and the Yoruba southwest and Igbo southeast predominantly Christian, alongside indigenous traditional religions, including Yoruba Ifa divination and Igbo Odinani, that persist both independently and blended within Christian and Muslim practice through syncretic movements.

Islam reached northern Nigeria via trans-Saharan trade and the Kanem-Bornu and Hausa city-state kingdoms from as early as the eleventh century, while the nineteenth-century Sokoto Caliphate, founded by the Fulani religious reformer Usman dan Fodio in an 1804 jihad, established one of West Africa's most influential Islamic states and shaped the north's religious and political character into the colonial and postcolonial periods. Christianity took root chiefly through nineteenth and twentieth century missionary activity in the south, producing a religious landscape now home to some of the world's largest Pentecostal megachurches, and Nigeria's Yoruba diaspora religion, carried by the transatlantic slave trade, seeded major traditions including Santeria in Cuba and Candomble in Brazil.