The Hehe (Swahili collective: Wahehe) is a Bantu ethnolinguistic group based in Iringa Region in south-central Tanzania, speaking the Bantu Hehe language. In 2006, the Hehe population was estimated at 805,000, up from the just over 250,000 recorded in the 1957 census, when they were the eighth largest ethnic group in Tanganyika. There were an additional 4,023 of them in Uganda in 2014.

Historically, they are famous for vanquishing a German colonial expedition at Lugalo on 17 August 1891 and maintaining their resistance for seven years thereafter under the leadership of their chief Mkwawa.

The use of Wahehe as the group's designator can be traced to their war cry, and was originally employed by their adversaries.^{[citation needed]} The Wahehe themselves adopted it only after the Germans and British applied it consistently, but by then the term had acquired connotations of prestige.^{[citation needed]}

It appeared from the Report of the East Africa Commission that, from the point of view of research, the British record in Tanganyika might be exposed to criticism by an international Commission, insomuch as, from reasons of pressing economy following the War, it had been found necessary to suppress the research establishment previously maintained by the Germans.

"Of scientific literature on British East Africa", remarked John Walter Gregory in 1896, "there is unfortunately little to record. There is nothing which can compare with the magnificent series of works issued in description of German East Africa […] The history of the exploration of Equatorial Africa is one to which Englishmen can look back with feelings of such just pride, that we may ungrudgingly admit the superiority of German scientific work in this region." It is no surprise, therefore, that most of the important sources for the history of the Hehe are German. Once German East Africa was split between the British and Belgian empires after World War I, the interest of German scholars waned, and the British chose not to continue their research.

The people who were eventually called Hehe by Europeans lived in isolation on a highland in southwestern modern-day Tanzania, northeast of Lake Nyasa (Lake Malawi). They had few ancestors who had been in their region called Uhehe for more than four generations. With the exception of some pastoralists on the plains and some keeping a limited number of cattle and goats, the Wahehe were primarily an agricultural people. In the beginning they seemed to have lived in relative peace, although the various chiefs did quarrel with one another, raided each other for cattle and broke alliances. The population was probably small, with no chiefdom over 5,000 people. By the middle of the 19th century, however, Nguruhe, one of the more important chiefdoms led by the Muyinga dynasty, began to push its weight around and expand its influence and power.

It was Munyigumbe, of the Muyinga family, who began to create the beginnings of a 'state' by both marriage and conquest. A good deal of this was at the expense of the Wasangu, using the Sangu's own military tactics and even utilizing forms of the Sangu language to properly rouse Hehe warriors to battle. Munyigumba even forced the Wasangu, under Merere II, to move their capital to Usafwa.

With Munyigumba's death in 1878 or 1879, a civil war broke out and a Nyamwezi slave, married to Munyigumba's sister, was able to kill Munyigumba's brother, leaving the unhappy prospect of dealing with Munyigumba's son Mkwawa. Mkwawa killed the Nyamwezi slave, Mwumbambe, at a location called the "place where heads are piled up", and Mkwawa became the paramount leader of the Wahehe until the end of the 19th century. John Iliffe describes Mkwawa in his book A Modern History of Tanganyika as "slender, sharply intelligent, brutal, and cruel with a praise-name of the madness of the year".