Prior to British involvement in the affairs of the geographical area that later became Nigeria, the peoples had interacted through trade, marriage, and cultural exchanges. Thus, there already existed shared values and attitudes which were not broken by colonialism. These pre-colonial common connections were cast into the dustbin of politics, and ethnicity was invoked by the inheritors and successors of British colonialism. In contemporary Nigeria, competitions for economic and political resources have assumed virulently ethnic and regional dimensions which have ignored the enduring legacies of harmonious inter-group relations that existed prior to British colonialism. This paper, therefore, attempted to interrogate those factors that served to foster harmonious and peaceful coexistence among the various ethnic groups that later came to constitute Nigeria after the 1914 amalgamation. In so doing, it adopted the qualitative research methodology which basically involved reliance mainly on such secondary sources as books, journals, and other documentary materials. It concluded that Nigeria’s search for national integration should not ignore the history of inter-ethnic and inter-group relations in the period before contacts with Europe. By internalising the factors that brought the different groups together before 1914, Nigerians would have learnt from the past in order not to bungle the present and jeopardise the future.