Hausa farmers outsmarted British planners and grew groundnuts instead of cotton
When the railway reached Kano in 1911, British officials expected Hausa farmers to grow cotton. The farmers judged that cotton needed more labour and groundnuts fetched better European prices. They switched so decisively that within two years the railway could not carry the harvest, and merchants piled sacks of nuts in Kano's streets.
The Hausa number around 86 million, centred on the Sahel and savanna of southern Niger and northern Nigeria, a homeland known as Kasar Hausa. Their language is the second most widely spoken in the Afro-Asiatic family, after Arabic. Over the past five centuries Hausa communities spread along trade routes and the pilgrimage road to Mecca, reaching coastal cities such as Lagos and Accra and even the Hijaz, where the surname Hausawi still marks Hausa descent. Most Hausa are Muslim, and horses remain a symbol of the old nobility at Eid celebrations.
Daura is regarded as the oldest Hausa city. Iron-working communities lived on Dalla Hill in Kano by the 7th century, and the seven Hausa Bakwai kingdoms took shape between the 7th and 11th centuries; the Bayajidda founding legend is generally dismissed by scholars as myth. By the 16th century states such as Kano and Katsina were powerful hubs of trans-Saharan trade, exporting leather, textiles, gold, salt and kola nuts. Islam spread with commerce, and by the early 15th century the Hausa wrote their own language in a modified Arabic script called ajami, producing histories such as the Kano Chronicle.
Rulers left lasting marks. Muhammad Rumfa of Kano, who reigned from 1463 to 1499, extended the walls, built a great palace and founded the Kurmi Market, still trading today. Queen Amina of Zazzau, a mid-16th-century conqueror whose dates are disputed, is credited with the earthen walls that became the model for fortifications across Hausaland. Katsina's 14th-century Gobarau Minaret, around 50 feet high, may be among West Africa's first multi-storey buildings.
In 1804 the Fula scholar Usman dan Fodio launched a jihad accusing Hausa rulers of corrupt, syncretic Islam, and within four years most Hausa kingdoms had fallen to the new Sokoto Caliphate. The British under Frederick Lugard conquered Sokoto in 1903, abolished the caliphate but kept the sultan as a figurehead, and ruled through emirs who retained considerable local autonomy.
Source: Hausa people
