Burukutu

A traditional alcoholic beverage brewed from guinea corn (sorghum) or millet. It is thick, cloudy, and mildly alcoholic. Burukutu is commonly consumed in social and communal settings.

Guinea corn (sorghum) or millet

Guinea corn or millet is soaked, germinated, dried, ground, boiled, and fermented over several days to produce the beverage.

Consumed at social gatherings, cultural occasions, festivals, and communal celebrations.

A traditional communal drink with deep social significance in Tiv culture. Sharing Burukutu represents fellowship, hospitality, and communal bonding among the Tiv people.

Akiga Sai, writing in 1935, describes how Tiv sorghum beer was made and shared. When the sorghum was harvested, a man would ask his wife to brew beer for his kinsmen; she pounded the sorghum heads, took the grain and prepared the beer, which was served to the guests in pots on an appointed day. Its taste mattered: a sweet beer was said to be badly brewed and fit only for women and children, while a vinegary one was beer for grown men, who would drink, sing and praise their host before going home in the evening. Beer was also brewed for the biamegh rites, and Akiga notes that the Ugenyi bought Tiv bulrush millet to mix with sorghum for their own fermented drink, tashi. He records that the Tiv obtained sorghum itself from the Ugenyi, and lists the old varieties genyi, ikyeghgbenda, iyôngo atsume, jinawa and ichanikule.

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) is a tall annual grass, up to 5 metres, used by people since at least 1,000 BC and today the fifth most grown cereal in the world. For brewing, the grain is germinated, dried and ground into malt, which is then fermented. Studies of burukutu in Ghana describe four stages: malting, mashing, souring and alcoholic fermentation.

Note on sources: Akiga does not use the name burukutu, which is widely used for opaque sorghum beer across Nigeria and Ghana. The Tiv food guide tivpeople.com describes burukutu as brewed from guinea corn and millet and notes that, although the Tiv cannot claim it as their own, it is widely drunk in Tivland.

Sources: tivpeople.com, "Tiv Food" (Internet Archive copy, 25 January 2025); Akiga Sai, History of the Tiv (1935), translated by Harold M. Bergsma and Martin L. Akiga, Africa 85(4), 2015, chapters two and three; Useful Tropical Plants database (Fern, K.); Atter et al., studies of burukutu production in Ghana (Food Research Institute, Accra).

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.