Hausa, name of an African people of north-western Nigeria and south-western Niger. The Hausa are an ethnically diverse but culturally fairly homogeneous people numbering about 10 million to 15 million individuals.

Originally organized into a group of feudal city-states, the Hausa were conquered from the 14th century on by a succession of West African kingdoms—among them, Mali, Songhai, Bornu, and Fulani. The Hausa occasionally attained enough power and unity, however, to throw off foreign domination and to engage in local conquest and slave raiding themselves. In the opening years of the 20th century, with the Hausa on the verge of overthrowing the Fulani, the British invaded northern Nigeria and instituted their policy of indirect rule. Under the British the Fulani were supported in their political supremacy, and the Hausa—Fulani ruling coalition, still dominant in northern Nigeria, was confirmed. The beginnings of this coalition were, however, much earlier, because the Fulani governed simply by assuming the highest hereditary positions in the well-organized Hausa political system. Many of the ruling Fulani have now become culturally and linguistically Hausa.

Although the earliest Hausa were animists, Islam is now the dominant organized religion among all but several thousand Hausa, called Maguzawa, who are animists. Hausa culture manifests a greater degree of specialization and diversification than that of most of the surrounding peoples. Subsistence agriculture is the primary occupation of most, but other skills such as tanning, dyeing, weaving, and metalworking are also highly developed. The Hausa have long been famous for wide-ranging itinerant trading, and wealthy merchants share the highest social positions with the politically powerful and the highly educated. Hausa architecture is distinctive: houses are made from cone-shaped mud bricks with wooden beams (from palm trunks) for the roof. They often have a dome-shaped room constructed from wooden frames that form arches and are then covered in mud.

The Hausa language is the largest and best-known member of the Chadic subfamily of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages. Hausa has borrowed freely from other languages, especially Arabic, and is adapting well to the demands of contemporary cultural change. It has become a common language for millions of non-Hausa West Africans, and sizeable Hausa-speaking communities exist in each major city of West and North Africa as well as along the trans-Saharan trade and pilgrimage routes. Extensive literature and several periodicals in Romanized script have been produced since the beginning of British rule. An Arabic-based writing system (ajami), developed before the British conquest, is still in limited use. Hausa names are predominantly Arabic due to the influence of Islam—traditional Hausa names are rare. Babies are named one week after birth.