Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Before the British colonization (1884), there were no inter-religious conflicts, Nigeria in its present borders did not exist as a single nation and the Muslim populations of northern Nigeria lived peacefully in mutual tolerance with the local animist and even Christian minorities.
The history of the territories which since ca. 1900 have been known under the name of Nigeria during the pre-colonial period (16th to 18th centuries) was dominated by several powerful West African kingdoms or empires, such as the Oyo Empire and the Islamic Kanem-Bornu Empire in the northeast, and the Igbo kingdom of Onitsha in the southeast and ...
The pre-colonial era was characterized by a high degree of religious diversity and tolerance among the different ethnic groups. [10] There was no concept of a state religion or a secular state in pre-colonial Nigeria. [3] Religion was mainly a personal matter, and each group had its own religious institutions and authorities. [3]
Nigerian American professor of indigenous African religions at Harvard University, Jacob Olupona summarized the many traditional African religions as complex animistic religious traditions and beliefs of the African people before the Christian and Islamic "colonization" of Africa.
However, unlike nearby Ghana, for example, Nigeria had not fought for its independence; Nigerian sovereignty had virtually slipped out of Britain's faint hand, exhausted by the Second World War, and fallen into the lap of the unprepared colony. The Nigerian independence movement lacked both the unifying experience of a struggle for freedom and ...
Native African religions are centered on ancestor worship, the belief in a spirit world, supernatural beings and free will (unlike the later developed concept of faith). Deceased humans (and animals or important objects) still exist in the spirit world and can influence or interact with the physical world.
Between 16,000 BP and 12,000 BP, Late Stone Age West Africans began dwelling in the eastern and central forested regions (e.g., Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria; [10] between 18,000 BP and 13,000 BP at Temet West and Asokrochona in the southern region of Ghana, 13,050 ± 230 BP at Bingerville in the southern region of Ivory Coast, 11,200 ± 200 BP ...
The Kingdom of Nri (Igbo: Ọ̀ràézè Ǹrì) was a medieval polity located in what is now Nigeria.The kingdom existed as a sphere of religious and political influence over a significant part of what is known today as Igboland prior to expansion, and was administered by a priest-king called an Eze Nri.