A report on Lagos, Yoruba people, Nigeria and Sub-Saharan Africa

Lagos (Nigerian English: ; Èkó) is the largest city in Nigeria and the second most populous city in Africa, with a population of 15.4 million as of 2015 within the city proper - daily the Lagos area is growing by some 3,000 people, or around 1.1 million annually, so the true population figure of the greater Lagos area in 2022 is roughly 28 million (up from some 23.5 million in 2018).

The Yoruba people (Ìran Yorùbá, Ọmọ Odùduwà, Ọmọ Káàárọ̀-oòjíire ) are a West African ethnic group that mainly inhabits parts of Nigeria, Benin and Togo.

The largest city in Nigeria is Lagos, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world and the second-largest in Africa.

The Lagos metropolitan area is a major educational and cultural centre in Sub Saharan Africa.

Lagos initially emerged as a home to the Awori subgroup of the Yoruba of West Africa and later emerged as a port city that originated on a collection of islands, which are contained in the present day Local Government Areas (LGAs) of Lagos Island, Eti-Osa, Amuwo-Odofin and Apapa.

The three largest ethnic groups are the Hausa in the north, Yoruba in the west, and Igbo in the east, together comprising over 60% of the total population.

It produced life-sized terracotta figures that are some of the earliest known sculptures in Sub-Saharan Africa and smelted iron by about 550 BC and possibly a few centuries earlier.

For a long time also, Ibadan, one of the major Yoruba cities and founded in the 1800s, was the largest city in the whole of Sub Saharan Africa.

Today, Lagos (Èkó), another major Yoruba city, with a population of over twenty million, remains the largest on the African continent.

Other major states included the kingdoms of Ifẹ and Oyo in the western block of Nigeria which became prominent about 700–900 and 1400 respectively, and center of Yoruba culture.

Their dominance reached as far as the well-known city of Eko which was named Lagos by the Portuguese traders and other early European settlers.

Lagos is a city in the Nigerian state of Lagos.