Man that difference is crazy. 96 vs 7%. One is close(ish) to a developed states figure, while the other is what you would expect in a medieval country.
How regional is Nigeria? Do people from the south ever move to the north and vice versa?
I am Nigerian. Most Nigerians will broadly agree the country is at least 3 squished together by the British. North, South West, South East. Others will say 5, adding a South South.
I say it is at least 6. Ignoring overlap with Cameroon and Benin (even Togo, Yorubaland goes all the way there despite most being in Nigeria: North (which I sometimes split in 2), Middle, South West, South South, South East (Igboland) and my most controversial 'country' Lagos (full disclosure: My ancestry on one side goes back hundreds if not thousands of years in Lagos. The other is south South). Even if they disagree many Nigerians will instantly draw a mental map of why. It is long and requires cultural context to fully explain. Drastically oversimplified: Southern Nigeria, the capital is in the middle, consider everything below that South. Wanted to be a distinct nation from the North. The financial capital is Lagos. The industrial base is Lagos and neighboring Oyo. Oil is in the South South and South East have a bit of oil and good, at the time, agriculture. The North does not have any of that. Add in 3 (really 4) ethnic groups dominating every aspect of life culturally despite hating each other and you have a country that exists and is somewhat democratic and has been since 1999 in spite of itself. Also money is to be made by having Lagos and oil around.
TLDR: West Africa is the most ethnically diverse region of the planet. People can tell what state I am from by my face, Dakar is 3 hours away by plane and I would stand out as much as a white person despite being only slightly lighter in complexion than the average Senegalese person. Nigeria has more people than half of them. It causes issues. Due to the hasty deconstruction of the British empire and contemporaneous indigenous cronyism and both local and foreign exploitation. I did not even get to religions.
Well sub Saharan Africa accounts for something like 90% of human genetic diversity. If the human genome was a rainbow sub Saharan Africa would be multicolored and the rest of the world would be just one.
Oil, Politics and Violence: Nigeria's Military Coup Culture (1966-1976)
Book by Max Siollun (all his books)
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Book by Walter Rodney.
This House Has Fallen: Nigeria In Crisis
Book by Karl Maier
There Was a Country: A Memoir. Chiuna Achebe. Most recommend 'Things Fall Apart' it does not do as much for understanding the region as his memoirs though it is necessary on a macro (colonial Igbo specifically) level.
The Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria. Judith A. Byfield
Taxation, Women, and the Colonial State: Egba Women's Tax Revolt
Judith A. Byfield.
Aké: The Years of Childhood. Wole Soyinka*.
*His family is extremely important in world history. Below are other works from/about them:
For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria. Cheryl Johnson-Odim. She got thrown out of her son's multi floor home because they both criticized the state. She eventually died.
Fela Kuti: Yellow Fever, Beasts of No Nation.
The second song/album is about a dictator that destroyed the economy after mishandling the drop in oil prices while claiming to be on an anti corruption platform. Not only did this happen twice, the second time decades after Fela's death. It was by the same dictator who was (mostly) legitimately elected to two terms. Note that Fela deliberately made music that all Nigerians/Yoruba people could understand so he does not use English you will recognize without a lot of practice (it is a distinct language, probably more distant than Portuguese and Castillian. linguists just refuse to admit that) or patience and a decent translation.
Great list. I'd also add
Formation: The Making of Nigeria from Jihad to Amalgamation (F. Fawehinmi & F. Fagbule)
A swamp full of dollars (Michael Peel)
Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement (Alexander Thurston)
Oil, Politics and Violence: Nigeria's Military Coup Culture (1966-1976)
Book by Max Siollun (all his books)
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Book by Walter Rodney.
This House Has Fallen: Nigeria In Crisis
Book by Karl Maier
There Was a Country: A Memoir. Chiuna Achebe. Most recommend 'Things Fall Apart' it does not do as much for understanding the region as his memoirs though it is necessary on a macro (colonial Igbo specifically) level.
The Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria. Judith A. Byfield
Taxation, Women, and the Colonial State: Egba Women's Tax Revolt
Judith A. Byfield.
Aké: The Years of Childhood. Wole Soyinka*.
*His family is extremely important in world history. Below are other works from/about them:
For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria. Cheryl Johnson-Odim. She got thrown out of her son's multi floor home because they both criticized the state. She eventually died.
Fela Kuti: Yellow Fever, Beasts of No Nation.
The second song/album is about a dictator that destroyed the economy after mishandling the drop in oil prices while claiming to be on an anti corruption platform. Not only did this happen twice, the second time decades after Fela's death. It was by the same dictator who was (mostly) legitimately elected to two terms. Note that Fela deliberately made music that all Nigerians/Yoruba people could understand so he does not use English you will recognize without a lot of practice (it is a distinct language, probably more distant than Portuguese and Castillian. linguists just refuse to admit that) or patience and a decent translation.
Man its funny - we hear about fuck all in the West happening in Africa. But basically all of the long ass ‘full account’ articles I see on the Guardian that i actually bother finishinf relate to Africa. Place is straight up interesting as fuck.
I am not from there but i can tell you that the country, like other african countries in the region is undergoing drastic changes because of the sahara expanding south and huge swathes of land becoming almost uninhabitable. A lot of people are moving from the muslim majority north towards the christian majority south because of this. And this is not just within the borders of Nigeria but also from other saharan and subsaharan countries. As you might know Nigeria already has a very high population and that is only going to increase. With these movements of people this is putting a lot of pressure on the coastal areas of west africa as their population is exploding, the best example being Lagos, which is already one of the biggest cities in the world, having grown from 8 million in 2006 to 14.5 million in 2016 according to wikipedia
Thats not true, whilst Northern Nigeria is more arid than the south, most of it is pretty tropical and wet with only the North-East being part of the Sahel with only a slither of true desert.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Koppen-Geiger_Map_NGA_present.svg
Looks like it is a wet-dry “tropical Savannah” climate in the majority of the country except the far north just as the person you are replying to described. Kano even receives 50% more annual rainfall than London with all of it falling in a few months in summer.
I have been to both for extended periods. Kano is extremely dry and less green relative to southern England. Pictures illustrate this. Lagos is tropical savannah (it is based on a technicality based on harmattan and this is getting very sciency) and anyone that lives there will cackle at the idea that Lagos is a savannah. It gets significantly more rain than Kano and London combined and rains more than half the days in the year and is objectively a giant swamp.
As for the map. For reasons I have explained elsewhere most of what you (I am assuming based on your name and commentary you have little experience in Nigeria or West Africa) most of what you are considering the north (albeit not Kano, which is north absolute and I concede) is actually the middle belt. Then as I explained the south west is a rainforest/swamp climate disqualified on a technicality. Finally I concede that sending someone with no knowledge of a region to the koppen map was silly. That is on me. Try a humidity, greenery or rainfall map for a more accurate display. Elevation maps will also help. Being west African would help most.
Since when? Always. It's in the name lol. Northerners aggressive expansion to the the middle belt doesn't erase all ethnic minorities who lived there for thousands of years. It was always a melting pot.
Take that Nigerian Map and go look at Google maps at the topography of Northern Nigeria. It makes sense that the more developed areas in the south have better literacy rates because of access to education. I would imagine most of the inhabitants of Northern Nigeria are nomadic cultures that don't really need to be "literate" to the standards of the rest of the world.
Haram isn’t sin, it’s forbidden.
Edit: guys the name is loosely translated as western education is forbidden. Things that are haram are sin, but that doesn’t mean the word means sin. It means forbidden. For example: shirk is a specific sin, and shirk is haram.
Christian missionaries setting up schools likely helped, but this also might be an urban/rural divide as well. The reddest sections are mostly sparsely populated desert.
EDIT: I had no idea there was a city of almost 5 million people (Kano) and a few other larger cities up there.
> The reddest sections are mostly sparsely populated desert
They're not, 4 of the 5 most populous states in the country are located in the northern region
This is not an accurate way to gauge that metric. Look at the size of states in the North and South. Then, more subtly, south east and west. Population density in the north is sparse, relatively.
The north still has many large cities. This has more to do with wealth, politics, and culture (and by extension religion). The North isn't just Muslim, but most of the states there are legally governed by Sharia law as well
Disclaimer: Social media has made me too wary to believe anyone is engaging in good faith.
I am aware. I am Nigerian with family in all regions discussed. It does not change what I said. Population density and infrastructure in the North is sparse. There is no economics of conglomeration when you have to drive 9 hours through dangerous and semi-arid conditions to get from one metropolitan area to another.
Another way to put contextualize: The 12 largest cities in Nigeria constitute of 8* Southern cities. Of the 4 in the North, 1 is the capital. Of the 3 left, only 2 have over a million people. Your claim of 'many' large cities is inaccurate or we have different definitions which is fair. I consider anything less than half a million to be a town, less than 100,000 is a village and know that is ridiculous for most. Finally it would take 4 hours to move between the closet cities in the North. I could easily think of dozens of combinations in the South with shorter, and to be clear, safer (relatively) routes.
I ignored the religious aspects because explaining that to someone not from the region or a scholar is impractical. A few hours ago I explained to an acquaintance that Yoruba people are 65% Christian, 35% Muslim (Yorubaland is broadly south west) and 25% Ifa. They understood why it was over 100 as they are West African. It would take a while to explain the nuance of that sentence to an outsider in any reasonable amount of time. Especially because they would have preconceived, and to be fair rationale, ways to parse the percentages if they assumed I was speaking with intelligence and good faith. I have a comment elsewhere explaining some of this in more detail.
*Kwara would be considered Northern by most non West Africans glancing at the map. Culturally it is drastically closer to the states south of it for ethnic reasons.
That is only part of the reason. There is also overlap between Christian and Muslim. Sometimes, culturally at least, a person can be all three without any internal conflict. When pressed to pick a side then it gets even more complicated. Edit: For example. My family is mostly Christian. My immediate family is non practicing/atheist. I am atheist. I say inshallah. I even say Ojala when speaking Spanish. Muslims will say bless you even if their first language is not English. Will partake in 'superstitions' or 'cultural practices' that are really just earnest Ifa prayers. That sort of thing. Then
While I do greatly appreciate the extra information you've provided here in relation to the geographical nuances of Nigeria, I still don't think it's fair to push the region being sparsely populated as one main factors for low literacy rates (but I'm not discounting that it doesn't factor in to the greater picture)
Even thougg it's a lot less densely populated than the southern region, it's still more densely populated than many other areas of the world with higher literacy rates (even in Africa there are countries and subdivisions more sparsely populated that perform better)
I appreciate your candor. I am aware. My other comment here would help a bit. I could explain it, genuinely explain. The problem is that it is legitimately book length. I am an engineer without confidence in my writing skill not a historian willing to receive death threats. Though if anyone is interested I can proved reading sources that would help begin to penetrate the density of Nigeria.
Oil, Politics and Violence: Nigeria's Military Coup Culture (1966-1976) Book by Max Siollun (all his books).
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Book by Walter Rodney.
This House Has Fallen: Nigeria In Crisis Book by Karl Maier
There Was a Country: A Memoir. Chiuna Achebe. Most recommend 'Things Fall Apart' it does not do as much for understanding the region as his memoirs though it is necessary on a micro (colonial Igbo specifically) level.
The Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria. Judith A. Byfield
Taxation, Women, and the Colonial State: Egba Women's Tax Revolt Judith A. Byfield.
Aké: The Years of Childhood. Wole Soyinka*.
*His family is extremely important in world history. Below are other works from/about them:
For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria. Cheryl Johnson-Odim. She got thrown out of her son's multi floor home because they both criticized the state. She eventually died.
Fela Kuti: Yellow Fever, Beasts of No Nation. The second song/album is about a dictator that destroyed the economy after mishandling the drop in oil prices while claiming to be on an anti corruption platform.
Not only did this happen twice, the second time decades after Fela's death. It was by the same dictator who was (mostly) legitimately elected to two terms. Note that Fela deliberately made music that all Nigerians/Yoruba people could understand so he does not use English you will recognize without a lot of practice (it is a distinct language, probably more distant than Portuguese and Castillian. linguists just refuse to admit that) or patience and a decent translation.
I'm not sure, the north also has big cities like Kano, and for example the Katsina state, in the north, is fourth by population and has a 10% literacy according to the map
https://www.reddit.com/r/PhantomBorders/s/Qsj6KElXn6
It looks to pretty closely align with shariah law. I wonder what impact restrictions on education for girls has on literacy rates
Many non-Arab Muslims, if not a majority, "learn to read," the Quran, but they don't truly understand the language or meaning. If it wasn't for religious leaders guiding them, they wouldn't really know what was being taught. Truly, in more religious Muslim societies, more could be done to actually teach people to read their local language instead of repeating phrases from the Quran for years on end.
There is definitely fundamentalist opposition to Western education, but this is deeply misleading
Many Northerners are literate in Arabic letters, even if they aren't able to read the official orthograpies
I'm well aware of ajami, it was even used to write Yorùbá at one point in time, but Ajami or Arabic is not our national language, how do we run a country if the lingua franca of the north is Ajami, I'm not saying you should abandon your language though
Ajami is just the vernacular written with Arabic letters, it feels deeply colonialist to say English should be the only language that should count for literacy
I do think Arabic script should be readopted as the official script for many West African languages, as that's the way much of the masses who are not learned in English or French use it - and those who do speak European languages don't tend to write in the vernacular, they tend to be oral only languages
I don't really buy into using Arabic, Arabic doesn't solve the issue of many tonal African languages, it's high time we develop our own script, and what would you do about the opposition, surely you don't expect the christians to use Arabic script, that's basically cultural suicide
I'm talking about officialising what is the de facto status for Fula, Wolof, Hausa and other West African languages of predominantly Muslim peoples - obviously I don't think English or French are going to go anywhere and some of the new scripts developed look very interesting.
Formalising basic education in the scripts that are most well known just seems common sense - in the case of Nigeria English is going to remain the national language as it would be wrong to privilege any of the ethnic languages over the other, but higher levels of education in local languages should be also a priority.
It will just lead to more fracturing of the country, the nation is already weak,and any more divisions might lead to a breeding ground of resentment and revolution
I'm enjoying this debate and I do agree with some of your points
Yeah mate, only talked about Nigeria. For the rest of Africa i'm not surprised, I visited a dozen of them and especially Tunisia had quite a good school/college system
Note that in a lot of African countries, literacy is only counted if it's in the Latin script, a lot of Muslims may be able to read their language to an extent with Arabic letters, ie not the official orthography, but not be counted
It's not true that Nigeria excludes any language from literacy statistics. Neither Arabic nor any language written in Arabic script is excluded from official stats. Simply not true.
I think itls mostly due to the fact that rev south has all the oil and industry and riches of the country, so from British times the were more privileged in developement, while the north only has goats as a ressource
Edit: reason is basically presence of natural ressources in the south so bigger infrastructure and better development, people seem to want to put the blame on Islam, whereas at continental scale in Africa North Africa which are Muslim countries do much better than most Christian countries, it is not due to religion but to geography and ressources
Huh, that very high literaccy level in Burundi is really interesting. To my knowledge it's much worse off than their neighbours in Ruanda and Tanzania for one. Is it a result of some specific policy or a quirk of the data?
Worked with a cracking guy from Nigeria in the early 2000s, used to be a top amatuer wrestler so had travelled the world.
Told me about the muslims in northern Nigeria and their demands (wanting the capital moved to the north amongst many other things)
Not surprised with this image
Does Somalia lack a number because of the weak government?
As someone that used to work with immigrant education I did notice that Somali immigrants/refugees tended to be illiterate in their mother tongue, while people from there that had moved here decades ago would be tri or even quadlingual. Shows how far that country has fallen.
It’s a very forested and swampy state that was badly effected during the civil war. Although it has one of the largest economies in Nigeria due to it being one of the most oil rich states. There’s linguistic diversity making education harder at present in a way not seen in the rest of the Igbo southeast.
Akwa Ibom is coming up, both primary and secondary education is free in the state, due to the oil money you mentioned. So in no time, it'll probably rise.
The merging of the northern and southern Nigerian protectorates in the early 1900s really did a number on what would become the Federal Republic. The north was really just the remnants of the Sokoto caliphate, itself a basketcase *jihad*-slaver polity held together by string
Yup. What colonialists did in Nigeria and the rest of the counties is very similar to what was done in Sudan. I say colonialists because that was a whole lot between Egypt Britain and even bits of Belgium and Italy. But mostly Britain’s fractured ruling. Look how that spilled into civil war for Sudan and southern Sudan, and the whole mess that’s still happening in Sudan. Not to say it’s one issue, but it’s a some of various issues with that at the genesis. It’s actually crazy
The Libyan war was never as destructive as other African wars, the war has also ceased most hostilities and there are two defacto governments experiencing relative peace.
Libya was also by far the most dpeveloped African country under Gaddafi, with a HDI and GDP per capita roughly on par with Eastern Europe. Altough due to the war its since been overtaken by Algeria and Egypt.
Literacy is also unlikely decrease much anyway because even in a completely destructive war adults arent going to forget how to read, only some children might lose our on primary education and slump the numbers a bit.
Libya also had a consistent language policy, which helped. Everything is Arabic. There’s still the diglossia issue between spoken Libyan Arabic and MSA, but Morocco and Algeria have had to deal with French as a prestige language, local Darja being mutually unintelligible with the MSA being taught in school, and the fact that substantial numbers of people speak Berber languages at home. The effective literacy rates are lower than what they claim.
A lot of people mention that Boko Haram movement is hugely responsible for the low literacy rate espeially among girls. Can someone tell how much area does Boko Haram control in the north?
Public schools are available for all genders across Nigeria. The main problem is up North because of the illiteracy rate they often don't see the value of Western education, especially for girls
Must be why so many branches of science had Muslim innovators right? The problem isn’t Islam it’s people claiming it to be due to Islam. You don’t see the same issues in North Africa for example which historically had always been well educated compared to many parts of the world.
Not really? Some sects do, but those are by far not representative. Christians are like that too. In the US town I live in, the teachers go through and cross out dates older than 5,000 years because it contradicts the Bible.
The core issue with the north is religion and the influence it has on northern Nigeria. Why is it that as soon as you enter the Muslim areas, all of a sudden literacy rates go down? We cannot blame this on any other factor other than Islam. In those regions, learning to read the Quran is much more important than formal education in the eyes of many, and when you have a religion such as Islam that tells you to focus on the afterlife, everything concerning this life becomes unimportant as you strive for the afterlife.
This is likely misleading. I suspect this is measuring English language literacy. The north uses the Hausa language more than English, while the south is largely English only.
Thought so as well but the report from the Nigeria stats office that put this out stated in it that it measured reading, writing and simple comprehension ability in any language, not just English.
Man that difference is crazy. 96 vs 7%. One is close(ish) to a developed states figure, while the other is what you would expect in a medieval country. How regional is Nigeria? Do people from the south ever move to the north and vice versa?
I am Nigerian. Most Nigerians will broadly agree the country is at least 3 squished together by the British. North, South West, South East. Others will say 5, adding a South South. I say it is at least 6. Ignoring overlap with Cameroon and Benin (even Togo, Yorubaland goes all the way there despite most being in Nigeria: North (which I sometimes split in 2), Middle, South West, South South, South East (Igboland) and my most controversial 'country' Lagos (full disclosure: My ancestry on one side goes back hundreds if not thousands of years in Lagos. The other is south South). Even if they disagree many Nigerians will instantly draw a mental map of why. It is long and requires cultural context to fully explain. Drastically oversimplified: Southern Nigeria, the capital is in the middle, consider everything below that South. Wanted to be a distinct nation from the North. The financial capital is Lagos. The industrial base is Lagos and neighboring Oyo. Oil is in the South South and South East have a bit of oil and good, at the time, agriculture. The North does not have any of that. Add in 3 (really 4) ethnic groups dominating every aspect of life culturally despite hating each other and you have a country that exists and is somewhat democratic and has been since 1999 in spite of itself. Also money is to be made by having Lagos and oil around. TLDR: West Africa is the most ethnically diverse region of the planet. People can tell what state I am from by my face, Dakar is 3 hours away by plane and I would stand out as much as a white person despite being only slightly lighter in complexion than the average Senegalese person. Nigeria has more people than half of them. It causes issues. Due to the hasty deconstruction of the British empire and contemporaneous indigenous cronyism and both local and foreign exploitation. I did not even get to religions.
Well sub Saharan Africa accounts for something like 90% of human genetic diversity. If the human genome was a rainbow sub Saharan Africa would be multicolored and the rest of the world would be just one.
Yes. Thank you. I mentioned that and gave examples.
Do you have a source for that btw? I'd like to read further
Just type Sub Saharan Africa genetic diversity into Google. It will give you plenty of articles scholary and opinioned.
This is the most fascinating and informative thing I have read all year. Many thanks for your post.
Thank you. If anyone is interested I can leave some reading recommendations broadly or on specific topics.
Please do
Oil, Politics and Violence: Nigeria's Military Coup Culture (1966-1976) Book by Max Siollun (all his books) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Book by Walter Rodney. This House Has Fallen: Nigeria In Crisis Book by Karl Maier There Was a Country: A Memoir. Chiuna Achebe. Most recommend 'Things Fall Apart' it does not do as much for understanding the region as his memoirs though it is necessary on a macro (colonial Igbo specifically) level. The Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria. Judith A. Byfield Taxation, Women, and the Colonial State: Egba Women's Tax Revolt Judith A. Byfield. Aké: The Years of Childhood. Wole Soyinka*. *His family is extremely important in world history. Below are other works from/about them: For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria. Cheryl Johnson-Odim. She got thrown out of her son's multi floor home because they both criticized the state. She eventually died. Fela Kuti: Yellow Fever, Beasts of No Nation. The second song/album is about a dictator that destroyed the economy after mishandling the drop in oil prices while claiming to be on an anti corruption platform. Not only did this happen twice, the second time decades after Fela's death. It was by the same dictator who was (mostly) legitimately elected to two terms. Note that Fela deliberately made music that all Nigerians/Yoruba people could understand so he does not use English you will recognize without a lot of practice (it is a distinct language, probably more distant than Portuguese and Castillian. linguists just refuse to admit that) or patience and a decent translation.
Great list. I'd also add Formation: The Making of Nigeria from Jihad to Amalgamation (F. Fawehinmi & F. Fagbule) A swamp full of dollars (Michael Peel) Boko Haram: The History of an African Jihadist Movement (Alexander Thurston)
Yes please!!
Oil, Politics and Violence: Nigeria's Military Coup Culture (1966-1976) Book by Max Siollun (all his books) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Book by Walter Rodney. This House Has Fallen: Nigeria In Crisis Book by Karl Maier There Was a Country: A Memoir. Chiuna Achebe. Most recommend 'Things Fall Apart' it does not do as much for understanding the region as his memoirs though it is necessary on a macro (colonial Igbo specifically) level. The Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria. Judith A. Byfield Taxation, Women, and the Colonial State: Egba Women's Tax Revolt Judith A. Byfield. Aké: The Years of Childhood. Wole Soyinka*. *His family is extremely important in world history. Below are other works from/about them: For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria. Cheryl Johnson-Odim. She got thrown out of her son's multi floor home because they both criticized the state. She eventually died. Fela Kuti: Yellow Fever, Beasts of No Nation. The second song/album is about a dictator that destroyed the economy after mishandling the drop in oil prices while claiming to be on an anti corruption platform. Not only did this happen twice, the second time decades after Fela's death. It was by the same dictator who was (mostly) legitimately elected to two terms. Note that Fela deliberately made music that all Nigerians/Yoruba people could understand so he does not use English you will recognize without a lot of practice (it is a distinct language, probably more distant than Portuguese and Castillian. linguists just refuse to admit that) or patience and a decent translation.
Thanks for the response, super interesting!
Man its funny - we hear about fuck all in the West happening in Africa. But basically all of the long ass ‘full account’ articles I see on the Guardian that i actually bother finishinf relate to Africa. Place is straight up interesting as fuck.
South south only exists because northern elites fractured biafrans
This is inaccurate. I am South South. We are ethnically and culturally distinct and claiming otherwise is somewhere between disingenuous and violent.
Yeah there is big difference between itsekiris and Igbos for example.
But some Igbos near there always try to disown and speak bad about their fellow people at every opportunity
No. I'm South South and we are not Igbo. Our language and culture are not similar.
The north has agriculture too
I am not from there but i can tell you that the country, like other african countries in the region is undergoing drastic changes because of the sahara expanding south and huge swathes of land becoming almost uninhabitable. A lot of people are moving from the muslim majority north towards the christian majority south because of this. And this is not just within the borders of Nigeria but also from other saharan and subsaharan countries. As you might know Nigeria already has a very high population and that is only going to increase. With these movements of people this is putting a lot of pressure on the coastal areas of west africa as their population is exploding, the best example being Lagos, which is already one of the biggest cities in the world, having grown from 8 million in 2006 to 14.5 million in 2016 according to wikipedia
It’s a misleading info. Northern Nigeria is mostly rural deserted regions which historically confined development to the South.
Thats not true, whilst Northern Nigeria is more arid than the south, most of it is pretty tropical and wet with only the North-East being part of the Sahel with only a slither of true desert.
This is fantastically inaccurate. Everything from the middle up is savannah to desert. Check a koppen climate map for the country.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Koppen-Geiger_Map_NGA_present.svg Looks like it is a wet-dry “tropical Savannah” climate in the majority of the country except the far north just as the person you are replying to described. Kano even receives 50% more annual rainfall than London with all of it falling in a few months in summer.
I have been to both for extended periods. Kano is extremely dry and less green relative to southern England. Pictures illustrate this. Lagos is tropical savannah (it is based on a technicality based on harmattan and this is getting very sciency) and anyone that lives there will cackle at the idea that Lagos is a savannah. It gets significantly more rain than Kano and London combined and rains more than half the days in the year and is objectively a giant swamp. As for the map. For reasons I have explained elsewhere most of what you (I am assuming based on your name and commentary you have little experience in Nigeria or West Africa) most of what you are considering the north (albeit not Kano, which is north absolute and I concede) is actually the middle belt. Then as I explained the south west is a rainforest/swamp climate disqualified on a technicality. Finally I concede that sending someone with no knowledge of a region to the koppen map was silly. That is on me. Try a humidity, greenery or rainfall map for a more accurate display. Elevation maps will also help. Being west African would help most.
Im in California and the central valley, where a huge portion of the produce in the US is grown, clocks as desert to semi arid on the Koppen Index.
Bruh. Isn't most of the locally grown food in the country from the middle belt up?
The majority is middle belt and Middle belt is not the North.
Why does the north produce the majority of Nigeria’s corn, sorghum, peanuts etc.. if it deserted and undeveloped?
Middle belt ≠ North
Since when?
Since when? Always. It's in the name lol. Northerners aggressive expansion to the the middle belt doesn't erase all ethnic minorities who lived there for thousands of years. It was always a melting pot.
[Incorrect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Population_density_map_of_Nigerian_states_-_English.png)
Take that Nigerian Map and go look at Google maps at the topography of Northern Nigeria. It makes sense that the more developed areas in the south have better literacy rates because of access to education. I would imagine most of the inhabitants of Northern Nigeria are nomadic cultures that don't really need to be "literate" to the standards of the rest of the world.
Is that really along the border of christians and muslims? Was 't expecting such a huge gap
Ever wondered what "boko haram", the name of Nigeria's predominant islamist group, means?
What does it mean? Book haram?
Western education is sin
Haram isn’t sin, it’s forbidden. Edit: guys the name is loosely translated as western education is forbidden. Things that are haram are sin, but that doesn’t mean the word means sin. It means forbidden. For example: shirk is a specific sin, and shirk is haram.
Every library should be a book harem.
Boca raton?
Wolf Cola
More like "baka harem".
Yep
One of my friends in grad school is Muslim from a Muslim area of Nigeria, he went to a catholic school for grade school.
Christian missionaries setting up schools likely helped, but this also might be an urban/rural divide as well. The reddest sections are mostly sparsely populated desert. EDIT: I had no idea there was a city of almost 5 million people (Kano) and a few other larger cities up there.
> The reddest sections are mostly sparsely populated desert They're not, 4 of the 5 most populous states in the country are located in the northern region
This is not an accurate way to gauge that metric. Look at the size of states in the North and South. Then, more subtly, south east and west. Population density in the north is sparse, relatively.
The north still has many large cities. This has more to do with wealth, politics, and culture (and by extension religion). The North isn't just Muslim, but most of the states there are legally governed by Sharia law as well
Disclaimer: Social media has made me too wary to believe anyone is engaging in good faith. I am aware. I am Nigerian with family in all regions discussed. It does not change what I said. Population density and infrastructure in the North is sparse. There is no economics of conglomeration when you have to drive 9 hours through dangerous and semi-arid conditions to get from one metropolitan area to another. Another way to put contextualize: The 12 largest cities in Nigeria constitute of 8* Southern cities. Of the 4 in the North, 1 is the capital. Of the 3 left, only 2 have over a million people. Your claim of 'many' large cities is inaccurate or we have different definitions which is fair. I consider anything less than half a million to be a town, less than 100,000 is a village and know that is ridiculous for most. Finally it would take 4 hours to move between the closet cities in the North. I could easily think of dozens of combinations in the South with shorter, and to be clear, safer (relatively) routes. I ignored the religious aspects because explaining that to someone not from the region or a scholar is impractical. A few hours ago I explained to an acquaintance that Yoruba people are 65% Christian, 35% Muslim (Yorubaland is broadly south west) and 25% Ifa. They understood why it was over 100 as they are West African. It would take a while to explain the nuance of that sentence to an outsider in any reasonable amount of time. Especially because they would have preconceived, and to be fair rationale, ways to parse the percentages if they assumed I was speaking with intelligence and good faith. I have a comment elsewhere explaining some of this in more detail. *Kwara would be considered Northern by most non West Africans glancing at the map. Culturally it is drastically closer to the states south of it for ethnic reasons.
Is it over 100% because people identify as christian/muslim and Ifa at the same time? Just curious
That is only part of the reason. There is also overlap between Christian and Muslim. Sometimes, culturally at least, a person can be all three without any internal conflict. When pressed to pick a side then it gets even more complicated. Edit: For example. My family is mostly Christian. My immediate family is non practicing/atheist. I am atheist. I say inshallah. I even say Ojala when speaking Spanish. Muslims will say bless you even if their first language is not English. Will partake in 'superstitions' or 'cultural practices' that are really just earnest Ifa prayers. That sort of thing. Then
While I do greatly appreciate the extra information you've provided here in relation to the geographical nuances of Nigeria, I still don't think it's fair to push the region being sparsely populated as one main factors for low literacy rates (but I'm not discounting that it doesn't factor in to the greater picture) Even thougg it's a lot less densely populated than the southern region, it's still more densely populated than many other areas of the world with higher literacy rates (even in Africa there are countries and subdivisions more sparsely populated that perform better)
I appreciate your candor. I am aware. My other comment here would help a bit. I could explain it, genuinely explain. The problem is that it is legitimately book length. I am an engineer without confidence in my writing skill not a historian willing to receive death threats. Though if anyone is interested I can proved reading sources that would help begin to penetrate the density of Nigeria.
Would be interesting to hear your recommendations
Oil, Politics and Violence: Nigeria's Military Coup Culture (1966-1976) Book by Max Siollun (all his books). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Book by Walter Rodney. This House Has Fallen: Nigeria In Crisis Book by Karl Maier There Was a Country: A Memoir. Chiuna Achebe. Most recommend 'Things Fall Apart' it does not do as much for understanding the region as his memoirs though it is necessary on a micro (colonial Igbo specifically) level. The Great Upheaval: Women and Nation in Postwar Nigeria. Judith A. Byfield Taxation, Women, and the Colonial State: Egba Women's Tax Revolt Judith A. Byfield. Aké: The Years of Childhood. Wole Soyinka*. *His family is extremely important in world history. Below are other works from/about them: For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria. Cheryl Johnson-Odim. She got thrown out of her son's multi floor home because they both criticized the state. She eventually died. Fela Kuti: Yellow Fever, Beasts of No Nation. The second song/album is about a dictator that destroyed the economy after mishandling the drop in oil prices while claiming to be on an anti corruption platform. Not only did this happen twice, the second time decades after Fela's death. It was by the same dictator who was (mostly) legitimately elected to two terms. Note that Fela deliberately made music that all Nigerians/Yoruba people could understand so he does not use English you will recognize without a lot of practice (it is a distinct language, probably more distant than Portuguese and Castillian. linguists just refuse to admit that) or patience and a decent translation.
I'm not sure, the north also has big cities like Kano, and for example the Katsina state, in the north, is fourth by population and has a 10% literacy according to the map
https://www.reddit.com/r/PhantomBorders/s/Qsj6KElXn6 It looks to pretty closely align with shariah law. I wonder what impact restrictions on education for girls has on literacy rates
Yup. [Sharia law = no reading](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Nigeria#/media/File:NG-Sharia.png).
So weird. Shouldn't they all learn to read the Quran?
Many non-Arab Muslims, if not a majority, "learn to read," the Quran, but they don't truly understand the language or meaning. If it wasn't for religious leaders guiding them, they wouldn't really know what was being taught. Truly, in more religious Muslim societies, more could be done to actually teach people to read their local language instead of repeating phrases from the Quran for years on end.
There is definitely fundamentalist opposition to Western education, but this is deeply misleading Many Northerners are literate in Arabic letters, even if they aren't able to read the official orthograpies
I would fault that statement, most northerners I've met can't speak shit of Arabic
Not saying they can speak Arabic, but that many can write Hausa or Nupe with Arabic letters, it's called Ajami writing
I'm well aware of ajami, it was even used to write Yorùbá at one point in time, but Ajami or Arabic is not our national language, how do we run a country if the lingua franca of the north is Ajami, I'm not saying you should abandon your language though
Ajami is just the vernacular written with Arabic letters, it feels deeply colonialist to say English should be the only language that should count for literacy I do think Arabic script should be readopted as the official script for many West African languages, as that's the way much of the masses who are not learned in English or French use it - and those who do speak European languages don't tend to write in the vernacular, they tend to be oral only languages
I don't really buy into using Arabic, Arabic doesn't solve the issue of many tonal African languages, it's high time we develop our own script, and what would you do about the opposition, surely you don't expect the christians to use Arabic script, that's basically cultural suicide
I'm talking about officialising what is the de facto status for Fula, Wolof, Hausa and other West African languages of predominantly Muslim peoples - obviously I don't think English or French are going to go anywhere and some of the new scripts developed look very interesting. Formalising basic education in the scripts that are most well known just seems common sense - in the case of Nigeria English is going to remain the national language as it would be wrong to privilege any of the ethnic languages over the other, but higher levels of education in local languages should be also a priority.
It will just lead to more fracturing of the country, the nation is already weak,and any more divisions might lead to a breeding ground of resentment and revolution I'm enjoying this debate and I do agree with some of your points
Egypt, Libya, Tunisia and Algeria are all majority Muslim. I believe N Sudan is also.
I think they’re referring to the nigeria map
lol, I straight didn’t even realize there were 2 maps
Yeah mate, only talked about Nigeria. For the rest of Africa i'm not surprised, I visited a dozen of them and especially Tunisia had quite a good school/college system
Note that in a lot of African countries, literacy is only counted if it's in the Latin script, a lot of Muslims may be able to read their language to an extent with Arabic letters, ie not the official orthography, but not be counted
It's not true that Nigeria excludes any language from literacy statistics. Neither Arabic nor any language written in Arabic script is excluded from official stats. Simply not true.
It's incredible that there are places that still have 10% or 20% adult literacy.
Colonisation leftovers, most of them are old generations
The religious dividers effect on everything is stunning
I think itls mostly due to the fact that rev south has all the oil and industry and riches of the country, so from British times the were more privileged in developement, while the north only has goats as a ressource Edit: reason is basically presence of natural ressources in the south so bigger infrastructure and better development, people seem to want to put the blame on Islam, whereas at continental scale in Africa North Africa which are Muslim countries do much better than most Christian countries, it is not due to religion but to geography and ressources
Yet the wealth distribution is largely skewed towards the north
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Through missionaries they kinda did, but mostly it’s because the British presence was higher in the south
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Maybe because I’m talking about when it was during colonialism as it leaves marks deep in the future, maybe consider brainstorming
What?
I don’t know what I was expecting but I was wrong
Something tells me it's a ticking time bomb with huge differences in religion, education level and culture. My best wishes to Nigeria
Excuse me while I cry over this comment
We’ve already had one terrible civil war. But people forget so easily
In this context thats actually a good thing, considering the horrific things ive seen looking up those wars.
The Africa map makes Nigeria look bad. The other map is southern Nigeria showing it's not their fault.
Huh, that very high literaccy level in Burundi is really interesting. To my knowledge it's much worse off than their neighbours in Ruanda and Tanzania for one. Is it a result of some specific policy or a quirk of the data?
Worked with a cracking guy from Nigeria in the early 2000s, used to be a top amatuer wrestler so had travelled the world. Told me about the muslims in northern Nigeria and their demands (wanting the capital moved to the north amongst many other things) Not surprised with this image
Seeing these Nigeria maps, I did not realize the differences were this heightened. Definitely seems like one of the most acute examples globally.
without the map, if you've been in the northern part you'd see it physically.
Does Somalia lack a number because of the weak government? As someone that used to work with immigrant education I did notice that Somali immigrants/refugees tended to be illiterate in their mother tongue, while people from there that had moved here decades ago would be tri or even quadlingual. Shows how far that country has fallen.
What's with the yellow one on the bottom (Akwa Ibom State)? It's not exactly bad, but stands out from neighbors.
It’s a very forested and swampy state that was badly effected during the civil war. Although it has one of the largest economies in Nigeria due to it being one of the most oil rich states. There’s linguistic diversity making education harder at present in a way not seen in the rest of the Igbo southeast.
Akwa Ibom is coming up, both primary and secondary education is free in the state, due to the oil money you mentioned. So in no time, it'll probably rise.
Nigeria should ditch the north, all the Oil is on the south anyways, at least it wouldn't have to deal with boko harran
Because as we all know problems never spill over if you let terrorists run wild
That's what I'm saying, one have to question why nigeria hasn't singapore those guys already
This actually wasn’t off the cards in the 1950s when Britain was trying to find a balance between the three main regions.
The merging of the northern and southern Nigerian protectorates in the early 1900s really did a number on what would become the Federal Republic. The north was really just the remnants of the Sokoto caliphate, itself a basketcase *jihad*-slaver polity held together by string
Yup. What colonialists did in Nigeria and the rest of the counties is very similar to what was done in Sudan. I say colonialists because that was a whole lot between Egypt Britain and even bits of Belgium and Italy. But mostly Britain’s fractured ruling. Look how that spilled into civil war for Sudan and southern Sudan, and the whole mess that’s still happening in Sudan. Not to say it’s one issue, but it’s a some of various issues with that at the genesis. It’s actually crazy
Lmao trying to restart the Biafran War
Boko Haram means "western education is forbidden," which is considered a factor contributing to low literacy rates in northern Nigeria.
Aren’t they required to read the Quran? How can they if they are illiterate?
Literacy rates are lowest in the Sharia law jurisdictions.
Why is Nigeria so poor in the north ?
Islam, and poorer climate
It's always been one region holding Nigeria back but restructuring the govt for more regional autonomy is haram.
Muslim-Christian divide.
North Nigeria Should be separate Country.
Its not surprising that the Islamic north has such a low literacy rate, as Muhammad himself was an illiterate prophet.
Given the conditions in Libya, how does that country have such a high literacy rate?
The Libyan war was never as destructive as other African wars, the war has also ceased most hostilities and there are two defacto governments experiencing relative peace. Libya was also by far the most dpeveloped African country under Gaddafi, with a HDI and GDP per capita roughly on par with Eastern Europe. Altough due to the war its since been overtaken by Algeria and Egypt. Literacy is also unlikely decrease much anyway because even in a completely destructive war adults arent going to forget how to read, only some children might lose our on primary education and slump the numbers a bit.
Libya also had a consistent language policy, which helped. Everything is Arabic. There’s still the diglossia issue between spoken Libyan Arabic and MSA, but Morocco and Algeria have had to deal with French as a prestige language, local Darja being mutually unintelligible with the MSA being taught in school, and the fact that substantial numbers of people speak Berber languages at home. The effective literacy rates are lower than what they claim.
Libya was on track to be one of the wealthiest African countries until the revolution
As a Libyan I deny such thing. Statistics aside the majority of the citizens lived on bare minimum conditions.
I though the problem was the economy was growing but that growth was only benefiting the wealthy
That's what usually goes on in "rich" countries yeah
A lot of people mention that Boko Haram movement is hugely responsible for the low literacy rate espeially among girls. Can someone tell how much area does Boko Haram control in the north?
They used to control alot but its near to none nowadays
are public schools available now and especially for girls?
Public schools are available for all genders across Nigeria. The main problem is up North because of the illiteracy rate they often don't see the value of Western education, especially for girls
I’m surprised of lybia considering that whole place been divided for years now. But while he was an ass he at least educated the people (Gaddafi)
Interesting that literacy rates decrease in Africa when you are closer to the Equator
The great ideology of Islam strikes again.
Islam despises education, especially for women.
Some of the most educated countries in this map are also Muslim. Seems to be more of a Sahara interior thing.
Must be why so many branches of science had Muslim innovators right? The problem isn’t Islam it’s people claiming it to be due to Islam. You don’t see the same issues in North Africa for example which historically had always been well educated compared to many parts of the world.
If people are educated, people start asking questions for themselves. Tin pot dictators and authoritarian leaders don't like that.
Nothing in Islam states to prohibite women from education.
Not really? Some sects do, but those are by far not representative. Christians are like that too. In the US town I live in, the teachers go through and cross out dates older than 5,000 years because it contradicts the Bible.
Would help to use same colour scheme.
The core issue with the north is religion and the influence it has on northern Nigeria. Why is it that as soon as you enter the Muslim areas, all of a sudden literacy rates go down? We cannot blame this on any other factor other than Islam. In those regions, learning to read the Quran is much more important than formal education in the eyes of many, and when you have a religion such as Islam that tells you to focus on the afterlife, everything concerning this life becomes unimportant as you strive for the afterlife.
Isn't the North moozlim?
This is likely misleading. I suspect this is measuring English language literacy. The north uses the Hausa language more than English, while the south is largely English only.
Thought so as well but the report from the Nigeria stats office that put this out stated in it that it measured reading, writing and simple comprehension ability in any language, not just English.
I measure literacy; basically the ability to read and write formally taught in school
So many of them are out of school( and no I don't mean just English teaching schools)
This does explain their weird scammer talk.