Tiv dance and music
For the Tiv, song (imo), dance (amar) and instrumental music (kwaghkuhan) belong together. A performance is all three at once: a lead singer raises the song, a chorus answers, drums and gongs set the beat, and dancers carry the story in their bodies. Tiv dances have long served to entertain, but also to praise, to mourn, to shame wrongdoers and to remember hard times.
From the old dances to swange
The oldest Tiv music grew from the songs of folktales (kwagh-alom) and of the great biamegh rite. Later came the ange dances, in which singers exposed wrongdoing; ingyôugh, a comic dance that began among people suffering from kwashiorkor; diga, born of colonial forced labour; and girinya, the dance of proven warriors. In the middle of the twentieth century these traditions fed into gbanyi and then swange, the music and dance now played by bands in almost every Tiv town.
The instruments
Tiv music is carried by drums of every size, from small hand drums to the great indyer slit drum whose messages could be heard for miles, together with the kwen gong, horns, flutes, rattles and the gida trumpet. How these instruments are made, and what they were used for, is part of the history of the Tiv as much as the songs themselves.
The articles below draw on Akiga Sai's History of the Tiv, written in 1935, on the 2013 book Tiv Swange Music and Dance, and on studies by Nigerian scholars of dance and theatre. Where the sources give different dates or explanations, each article shows them side by side. Dances and their stories differ from clan to clan, so if you know a dance, a song or an instrument that is missing here, please share it through the contribution form below.