Hausa

The Hausa are the farming and trading people of Hausaland, the Sahelian belt between the Niger River and Lake Chad. Between the seventh and eleventh centuries their walled cities of Daura, Kano, Katsina, Gobir, Zazzau and Rano formed the seven Hausa Bakwai kingdoms of the Bayajidda legend; iron-workers were already settled at Dalla Hill in Kano by the seventh century, and Kano's walls were raised from 1095 under Sarki Gijimasu. By the fourteenth century Kano and Katsina were trans-Saharan trade hubs, sending leather, cloth, salt and kola nuts north, and Hausa leather reached medieval Europe under the mistaken name of Moroccan leather. An equestrian aristocracy ruled over peasant villages, while merchants carried the Hausa language along trade routes as far as Agadez.

Islam spread with that trade: Muhammad Korau of Katsina became the first Muslim ruler in the mid-fourteenth century, and the Gobarau minaret made Katsina a centre of learning. From the early fifteenth century Hausa was written in ajami, an adapted Arabic script that produced the Kano Chronicle, while rural Maguzawa kept the old spirits and the Bori possession cult. In 1804 the Fulani scholar Usman dan Fodio launched a jihad, and by 1808 the Hausa kingdoms had been overrun and folded into the Sokoto Caliphate under Fulani emirs, forging the Hausa-Fulani identity of the Muslim north.