The black-and-white striped a'nger is today the best-known sign of Tiv identity. Traditional rulers, from the Tor Tiv downward, wear robes made from it, brides and grooms dress in it, and it is worn at cultural gatherings of every kind; woven cloth was also used to wrap the dead. But a'nger is only one of many Tiv cloths, and the story of how the Tiv came to weave at all is told in detail by Akiga Sai, who wrote his History of the Tiv in the Tiv language in 1935. From bark to cotton In the earliest times, Akiga writes, the Tiv had no woven clothes. Men and married women wore bark cloth, made by peeling the elastic bark of trees that grow in marshy forest, such as the tree the Tiv call po, and beating it until the dead outer layer came away and the bark became soft and supple. Others went without. The Tiv learned about cotton from a neighbouring people and taught themselves, slowly, to spin it into thread; at first they bought the cotton, and only later grew it themselves, planting the seeds on the sides of old yam heaps and harvesting the cotton in the harmattan season. Akiga notes that many of the Tiv words for spinning and weaving, such as majir for the spindle, came from Hausa, and concludes that it was largely from the Hausa that the Tiv learned their cotton craft. The Tiv spun two kinds of thread: dzer, thin and strong, and aba, thick and soft. Every Tiv cloth used both, because cloth woven from dzer alone was stiff, and cloth from aba alone was beautiful but did not last. The thread was woven on a small loom into narrow strips, which were then sewn together. The first cloth the Tiv knew how to weave was tugudu, a large white cloth of twenty strips, also called ikundu, "twenty". It was worn by elders when they went out, and it was a measure of wealth: five of them were the price of a Tiv cow, and a rich man was called "the one with five in hand". A ten-strip white cloth was worn by women, and young men made loincloths from one strip or ten. Dyeing and the named cloths Wanting variety, the Tiv began to dye their thread, at first by boiling it in indigo and later by the Hausa method, which few mastered. A dyer dug a pit about four feet deep, sealed its floor with pounded gravel and clay, and filled it with water, balls of indigo and the filtered ash of burnt trees such as the locust bean tree; after many days the indigo broke down and bundles of thread were soaked in it. As the practice spread, black thread was woven into Tiv cloth, and the number of cloth types grew. Akiga lists white cloths such as tugudu and akpem; striped cloths, anger and dzaan; spotted cloths; and cloths woven with black thread, such as gere and ashisha. Dress followed rank: a young man wore gere with a fancy wrapper over it, grown men wore akpem and gere and put on anger or another good cloth to go to a dance, and only chiefs wore the gown, a fashion taken from the Hausa. Imported cloths, bought in Wukari and elsewhere, were prized and worn by nobles and their wives on special occasions, and people would talk all night about who had been best dressed. By the 1930s, Akiga observed, young people preferred Hausa and European clothes, though Tiv cloth was still being made. A'nger today Two recent studies describe the weaving that continues. A 2018 study of weavers in Vandeikya lists Tiv cloths still made, among them a'nger, godo, gber, gberwaa, agbende akurugh, ivavtyo and deremen, and names the tools of the craft: the weaving frame (daa ikondo), the loom, pedals, beater, the shuttle (akusha), the needle used to join the strips, the weaver's seat (igbur) and pegs (amande). A 2025 study of the Jechira area, which it describes as the foremost centre of traditional cloth production in Benue State, records that the industry began to decline from about 1950 but never stopped, and that weaving was once a family enterprise: men prepared the ground and planted the cotton, women and children tended and picked it and spun the thread, and the head of the household wove and dyed. The same study explains that a'nger is made in two versions. The man's cloth is longer and wider, because men strap it over the torso and let it fall well below the knee, while women wrap it round the waist over a blouse, with a matching head-tie. Cloth also carried rank and restriction: wealthy men wore fine fabrics such as tugudu, gbagir, godo or swem-karagbe even on ordinary days, and one cloth, anger u ichenge igbee, was reserved for healers of the igbe complaint. Before money came into use, woven cloth served as currency, and bride price and the groom's gifts to his in-laws were paid in cloth, a custom that still survives in part. In Tiv weddings today, black-and-white beads are the most common accompaniment to a'nger. Where the stripes came from A popular story, repeated widely online, says that the Tiv once hunted the zebra for meat and for skins worn at ceremonies, found when they settled in the Benue valley that the zebra did not live there, and wove black-and-white cloth in its memory. No documented source for the story has been found; Akiga, writing in 1935, lists anger simply as one of the Tiv striped cloths. Sources: Akiga Sai, History of the Tiv (1935), translated by Harold M. Bergsma and Martin L. Akiga, Africa 85(4), 2015, chapter two; P. I. Iorja, "Traditional cloth weaving as a means of earning a living among the Tiv: a case study of Vandeikya Local Government Area", International Journal of Agricultural Research and Food Production 3(3), 2018; Korinya M. Tivlumun and V. S. Akran, "The efficacy of traditional cloth weaving industry and the economy of Jechira area of Benue State, 1992–1998", IGWEBUIKE: An African Journal of Arts and Humanities 11(2), 2025; Wikipedia, "Tiv people".