Iniongo i iyou mbi her

Annual harvest celebration marking the beginning of the new yam season.

Thanksgiving for successful harvest and prayers for continued prosperity.

Traditional dances, feasting, offering of first yams to ancestors

The earliest detailed written account of how the Tiv begin eating the new yam comes from Akiga Sai, who completed his History of the Tiv in the Tiv language in 1935. He describes the season as a sequence of farm work and rites rather than a single fixed day.

While weeding the yam farms, women would quietly dig up a few young yams for their children, which Akiga says was called "new yam stealing". The crop was eaten openly only once the yams had hardened. Before that, the village head, who had been initiated into the relevant akombo, asked his wife to dig up a yam so that he could perform the rite that had to come before general eating. Akiga names the akombo that were "set right" before new yams were eaten as wayo, agashi, akombo a dam, ribi and gwarmou.

When a little of the new crop had been eaten, the village head told the women to display yams (iyouv mbi penden). Early in the morning they dug up some of the biggest yams and laid them out in the village centre, or on drying racks, so that everyone could see the harvest was ready. A man of means would then kill an animal and open a pot of palm oil, which was shared among the women to cook for the men, who ate together while the names of the wives who had laid out yams were praised aloud. From then on everyone ate yams until the next bush-clearing season. Seed yams were dug later, when the dry season was advanced around the new year, and kept in covered pits.

Note on sources: Akiga calls the display iyouv mbi penden, while this entry uses the name Iniongo i iyou mbi her. Akiga describes akombo rites before the new yam is eaten but does not mention offering the first yams to ancestors.

Source: Akiga Sai, History of the Tiv (1935), translated by Harold M. Bergsma and Martin L. Akiga, Africa 85(4), 2015, chapter two.

See the Tiv people and the Tiv language in our Nigeria Heritage Archive: the states and local government areas where Tiv communities live, neighbouring peoples, population figures and sources.