Yorubaland

Yorubaland is the homeland and cultural region of the Yoruba people in West Africa, covering about 142,114 square kilometers across three present-day countries: Nigeria holds the great majority of the territory, roughly 106,000 square kilometers or three-quarters of the total, with the remainder split between Benin and Togo. The region is home to an estimated 55 million people, most of them ethnically Yoruba, and before European colonization it was never a single state but a shifting collection of independent kingdoms and empires occupying the same cultural and linguistic space, most prominently the Oyo Empire, the Ife Kingdom regarded as the spiritual origin point of Yoruba civilization, and the Ijebu Kingdom, each controlling its own territory within the wider Yoruba-speaking region of forest and savanna stretching inland from the Gulf of Guinea coast.