Ihuma (plural ahuma) is the Tiv brown or red cowpea. Cooked slowly overnight and finished with ground beniseed and palm oil, it was in the old days a prized dish, mainly for elders, and a woman who cooked it well became famous for it.
Red cowpeas (ahuma), beniseed (ishwa), palm oil.
The cowpeas are husked and put on the fire at twilight, and the fire is kept going until they are well cooked by dawn. Beniseed is then fried, ground and pounded in a mortar with palm oil, and mixed with the beans.
Served at daybreak in a large calabash. The husband invites his family to share it.
In the old days a quality dish, mainly for elders. In a time of famine a single bundle of red cowpeas was priceless, and a wife could become a celebrated cook for her skill in preparing them.
Akiga Sai, writing in 1935, gives a full account of red cowpeas (ahuma), one of the major kinds of bean. They are usually planted very early in the farming season, though some women plant them with other beans, and they mature slowly. The plant also forms small tubers underground, which women once dug up, cooked and ate with their families. Children roasted the beans, though roasted red beans could sometimes cause a severe headache or a stomach upset with vomiting. The beans can be eaten fresh or dried; at harvest they were gathered and bound in bundles.
He describes how the dish made a cook's name. A wife would husk the beans, set them on the fire at twilight and keep it going until dawn; then she fried beniseed, ground it and pounded it in a mortar with palm oil, and at daybreak served it to her husband in a large calabash. He invited his family to share it, though some did not wait to be asked: hearing the pounding, they came anyway. They praised the cook afterwards as one who could make so much that a crowd could not finish it, and "this is how women acquired good reputations through culinary skills in cooking red beans".
This archive's dictionary gives ihuma as the Tiv brown bean, plural ahuma, and its plant list identifies ahuma as the cowpea, Vigna unguiculata.
Sources: Akiga Sai, History of the Tiv (1935), translated by Harold M. Bergsma and Martin L. Akiga, Africa 85(4), 2015, chapter two.
Charles Ihungwa Ikyese
History of the Tiv (complete English translation)
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.