Hausa Bakwai kingdoms begin to take shape in northern Nigeria

Story: 650 C.E.  |  Last updated: January 1, 0650

Sometime in the 7th century C.E., on a hill called Dalla in what is now Kano, a community of iron workers set down roots. They had migrated from a place called Gaya, and they were Hausa. That settlement — small, practical, built on craft and land — was one of the earliest traceable nodes in a network that would eventually become one of West Africa’s most enduring political and cultural formations: the Hausa Bakwai, the seven original Hausa kingdoms.

What the evidence shows

• Hausa Bakwai kingdoms: Written and oral records place the earliest Hausa kingdoms in the 7th to 11th centuries C.E., with Daura widely regarded as the oldest, predating all other major Hausa cities in tradition and culture.
• Hausa iron working: The 7th-century C.E. Dalla Hill settlement in Kano is among the earliest documented evidence of organized Hausa community life, built around iron production — a foundation of both economy and political authority.
• Hausa language and culture: The Hausa people are a culturally cohesive group whose language belongs to the Afro-Asiatic family and is today the second most spoken language in that family after Arabic, spoken by around 86 million people across West Africa and beyond.

A civilization built on trade and craft

The Hausa did not emerge in isolation. They were shaped by — and shaped — the broader world of trans-Saharan exchange that connected sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and the Middle East over many centuries.

By the 14th century C.E., Hausa city-states like Kano and Katsina had become major hubs of long-distance trade. Their merchants specialized in leather goods, textiles, gold, salt, kola nuts, and henna. The primary exports moved along routes that linked the savannah to the coast, the desert to the river valleys.

Katsina became a center of Islamic scholarship, while Kano developed as a commercial powerhouse. The Kurmi Market in Kano, established by Sultan Muhammad Rumfa in the late 15th century C.E., once served as an international trading floor where North African goods met domestic production. It still operates today.

Islam arrived in Hausa territories gradually, carried by merchants and scholars along the same trade routes. By the mid-14th century C.E., Muhammad Korau of Gobir is generally recognized as among the first Muslim Hausa rulers. The Gobarau Minaret in Katsina, built in the 14th century C.E. in traditional Hausa Tuabli architecture, stands as one of the oldest multi-storey structures in West Africa — commissioned as a mosque and center of Islamic education.

Writing, scholarship, and the Ajami script

By the early 15th century C.E., Hausa scholars were recording their language using a modified Arabic script called Ajami. The resulting manuscripts — histories, astronomical observations, calendars — place the Hausa intellectual tradition alongside the famous Timbuktu Manuscripts as evidence of a rich literate culture in pre-colonial West Africa.

The most celebrated of these written histories is the Kano Chronicle, a detailed account of Kano’s rulers and events that historians still consult today. These documents challenge any assumption that West African political life was primarily oral or undocumented before European contact.

Queen Amina and the walls of Zaria

Among the figures who emerged from this civilization, Queen Amina of Zaria stands out. She ruled Zazzau — a Hausa kingdom — sometime in the mid-16th century C.E. for approximately 34 years. Oral tradition, recorded by scholars including anthropologist David E. Jones, describes her as a military leader and strategist who extended her dominion from Kwarafara to Nupe, subdued Bauchi, and extracted tribute from both Kano and Katsina.

Amina is credited with commissioning the defensive mud-brick walls — known as Ganuwar Amina, or Amina’s walls — that became the architectural standard for fortifications across the Hausa states. Sultan Muhammad Bello of Sokoto, writing in 1836 C.E., described her as “the first to establish government among the Hausa” in any coordinated, expansionist sense.

Her story is a reminder that political and military leadership in the Hausa Bakwai was not exclusively male — and that women’s contributions to African statecraft are often better preserved in oral tradition than in the written records European colonizers later prioritized.

Lasting impact

The Hausa Bakwai kingdoms laid the political and cultural foundations for one of the most populous and linguistically influential groups in Africa. The trade networks they built connected the Sahel to the coast and the desert to sub-Saharan markets for centuries. Their written histories, their architecture, and their legal and scholarly institutions survived successive waves of political change — including the Sokoto jihad of 1804–1808 C.E., which transformed but did not erase Hausa culture.

Today, Hausa is one of the most widely spoken languages in Africa, used as a lingua franca across West Africa and heard on BBC Hausa broadcasts reaching millions of listeners. The cultural continuity from the 7th-century C.E. iron workers on Dalla Hill to the present is remarkable by almost any historical standard.

Daura, considered the oldest Hausa city, remains a cultural touchstone. The horse — once central to the Hausa aristocracy’s equestrian identity — still appears in Eid celebrations known as Ranar Sallah, a living thread between the ancient kingdoms and contemporary Hausa life.

Blindspots and limits

The founding narrative of the Hausa Bakwai is inseparable from the Bayajidda legend — a mythological account of a hero-prince who defeats a snake and marries a queen, fathering the seven kingdoms. Scholars broadly regard this as myth rather than history, which means the precise origins of the earliest Hausa polities remain difficult to pin down archaeologically. The 7th-to-11th-century C.E. formation period is supported by textual and oral evidence, but direct archaeological confirmation of political organization at that scale is still limited. The historical record also largely reflects elite and male perspectives; the lives of Hausa farmers, craftswomen, and non-Muslim communities like the Maguzawa are less fully documented.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — Hausa people

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