Hausa, name of an African people of northwestern Nigeria and southwestern Niger. The Hausa are a racially diverse but culturally fairly homogeneous tribe numbering about 10 million to 15 million people.

Historically 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 by simply 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 Hausas were animists, Islam is now the dominant organized religion among all but several thousand Hausa, called Maguzawa. 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. Hausas have long been famous for wide-ranging itinerant trading, and wealthy merchants share the highest social positions with the politically powerful and the learned.

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 sizable Hausa-speaking communities exist in each major city of West and North Africa as well as along the trans-Saharan trade and pilgrimage routes. An extensive literature and several periodicals in Romanized script have been produced since the beginning of British rule. An Arabic-based writing system, developed before the British conquest, is still in limited use.