A Tiv soup made from the flower buds of ashwe, the roselle plant (Hibiscus sabdariffa). Soup made from the leaves of the same plant is simply called ashwe; when it is made from the flower buds, it is called agbende ashwe. It is also cooked with egusi, as agbende ashwe ha icheegh.
Ashwe (roselle) flower buds; for the egusi version, ground melon seed (icheegh).
Eaten with pounded yam (ruam kumen) and other kinds of ruam.
The Tiv food guide tivpeople.com draws the distinction between the two roselle soups: soup made from the leaves is simply called ashwe soup, while soup made from the flower buds is called agbende ashwe. The Tiv cooking channel MDEVAAN has published recipe videos on YouTube for both agbende ashwe and agbende ashwe ha icheegh, the version cooked with egusi. Egusi, called icheer or icheegh in Tiv, is made from melon seeds that are shelled, dried and ground into a coarse powder, and tivpeople.com calls it a very common Tiv soup in its own right.
Roselle has been a Tiv soup plant for a long time. Akiga Sai, writing in 1935, counts ashwe among the non-viscous, or "strong", soups, and records that women planted these soup plants on the yam farms during the early rains.
According to the Useful Tropical Plants database, the part of the roselle flower that is eaten is the fleshy calyx, the outer whorl that encloses the flower and later the seed pod. It has an acid flavour and a mucilaginous texture, is rich in pectin and citric acid, and is used in soups, sauces and jellies. There are green and red forms: the green is more often cooked as a vegetable, while the red is mostly used for colour and for a sour drink made by boiling the calyces with sugar and ginger. The plant flowers all year round. See also the Ashwe entry, for the soup made from the leaves.
Sources: tivpeople.com, "Tiv Food" (Internet Archive copy, 25 January 2025); MDEVAAN, "How to prepare Agbende Ashwe" and "How to prepare Agbende Ashwe ha Icheegh soup", YouTube; Akiga Sai, History of the Tiv (1935), translated by Bergsma and Akiga, Africa 85(4), 2015, chapter two; Useful Tropical Plants database (Fern, K.).
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.