Hausa Kingdoms

The Hausa Kingdoms were a cluster of independent city-states built by the Hausa people between the Niger River and Lake Chad, in what is now northern Nigeria. Centred on walled capitals such as Kano, Katsina, Zazzau and Gobir, they grew rich on crafts and long-distance trade and became seats of Islamic learning, while rarely uniting for long. They were conquered in the Fulani jihad and absorbed into the Sokoto Caliphate by 1808.

Hausa tradition traces the states to Bayajidda, a hero said to have come from Baghdad by way of Bornu. Arriving at Daura, he learned that a snake called Sarki, the Hausa word for king, guarded the town's only well and let people draw water only on Fridays. He killed the snake and married the queen, Daurama. His descendants are said to have founded the Hausa Bakwai, the seven "true" states of Daura, Kano, Katsina, Zazzau, Gobir, Rano and Biram, while descendants of a concubine founded the Banza Bakwai, seven lesser or "illegitimate" neighbours such as Zamfara, Kebbi and Nupe. Tradition also assigned the true states roles: Kano and Rano as textile and indigo centres, Katsina and Daura as markets, Zazzau as a supplier of slaves and Gobir as the guardian of the northern frontier.

When the states actually formed is unknown. Early leadership seems to have come from family heads and officials who performed rituals for good harvests, and over time growing towns became fortified capitals that controlled the surrounding countryside and its trade. A ninth-century writer, al-Ya'qubi, may refer to them. The word Hausa itself appears as a name for the people only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; before that, people were known by their city, as Kanawa of Kano or Katsinawa of Katsina. Herders, traders and scholars migrated into the region over the centuries, among them Tuareg, Fulani and Wangara merchants.

Islam probably arrived from the north and from Bornu, carried in part by the Wangara. Yaji I of Kano, who reigned from 1349 to 1385, is thought to have been the first Hausa ruler to become a Muslim, and he appointed a judge and an imam. Muhammad Rumfa of Kano (1463–1499) built mosques and schools and invited the scholar al-Maghili to write on Muslim government, and Kano and Katsina drew scholars from Egypt and North Africa. In Katsina a cleric, Muhammad al-Korau, seized the throne at the end of the fifteenth century, and Ibrahim Maje (1549–1566) introduced Islamic marriage law. Islam remained strongest among the urban elite, while much of the countryside kept older beliefs or blended them with the new faith.

The Hausa states sat between the great empires to the west, Ghana, Mali and Songhai, and Kanem-Bornu to the east. In the fifteenth century Bornu made at least some of them tributary, and in the sixteenth century the Songhai Empire appears to have done the same, according to Leo Africanus. The states exported slaves, leather, gold, cloth, salt, kola nuts and henna, and Hausa traders settled in quarters of foreign towns, spreading a trading network across the region.

Society rested on kinship. Commoners, the talakawa, farmed in units of two or more families called gandu, each headed by a maigida who settled disputes and led ceremonies. Strangers were absorbed through marriage or given special status, and trade between the states encouraged a common Hausa language.

Despite growth from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, constant wars among the states and with outsiders left them exhausted. In the eighteenth century famines were frequent and rulers taxed heavily to pay for their campaigns. Reformers accused the rulers of mixing Islam with older practices and of injustice, and a movement of Fulani fighters and Hausa peasants led by Usman dan Fodio conquered the states by 1808, joining them to the Sokoto Caliphate.

Shown on our maps as the Hausa States, the kingdoms appear on nine map years from 1492 to 1800. On the 1650 map they lie west of Kanem-Bornu and north of the Oyo Empire and Benin.