A Tiv soup that takes its name from vambe, the silk-cotton or kapok tree (Ceiba pentandra). The tender leaves, buds and young fruit of this tree are slimy when cooked, like okra. Vambe soup is still cooked and sold by Tiv soup sellers in Benue.
Vambe leaves, locust beans (nune), gbaaye, black pepper (yiye), fresh pepper (optional).
Eaten with pounded yam (ruam kumen), usually as one of several soups served together.
Daily Trust, reporting on food sellers in Benue in 2021, found vambe among the soups they cook, listed alongside atiever, ashwe and pocho; one seller said she had just finished "beniseed, vambe and atiever" soups for the day. The same report describes the Tiv custom of serving a bowl of pounded yam with at least four soups, especially to a visitor, with one usually a meat soup and the others made from vegetables in season.
This archive's dictionary gives vambe as the silk-cotton or cotton tree, and its plant list identifies it as the kapok tree, Ceiba pentandra. According to the Useful Tropical Plants database, it is a deciduous tree with a thin, pagoda-shaped crown, usually 10 to 30 metres tall but able to reach 70 metres, with a straight, often spiny trunk and sometimes large buttresses. It grows in West Africa as well as tropical America and has long been planted around villages for its many uses. It is valued above all for the fibre (kapok) in its seed pods, but it also supplies food and medicine. Its tender leaves, buds and fruit are mucilaginous and are eaten like okra; the seeds can be roasted and ground into a powder used in soups and as a flavouring, and an edible oil is pressed from them.
How it is made: the Tiv food guide tivpeople.com describes vambe as a slime or draw soup made from the leaves of the vambe, and the Tiv cooking channel MDEVAAN's vambe soup recipe on YouTube lists vambe leaves, locust beans (nune), gbaaye, black pepper (yiye) and, optionally, fresh pepper.
Note on sources: Akiga Sai (1935) uses vambe-iyo for manioc (cassava), so the word may also refer to other plants.
Sources: Daily Trust, "An abundance of soups", 1 April 2021; tivpeople.com, "Tiv Food" (Internet Archive copy, 25 January 2025); MDEVAAN, "Vambe soup recipe", YouTube; Useful Tropical Plants database (Fern, K.); Akiga Sai, History of the Tiv (1935), translated by Bergsma and Akiga, Africa 85(4), 2015.
Other Foods
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.