Adenge

A Tiv soup made from the peel of fresh beans: the empty pods left after the green beans have been boiled and shelled. The pods are dried and kept, and the dried pods are what is called adenge.

Dried bean pods (adenge).

Fresh beans are plucked from the plant while still green, and the pods are boiled. The skins are then peeled away to remove the seeds, and the peeled pods are dried. The dried pods are later cooked into adenge soup.

Eaten with pounded yam (ruam kumen) and other kinds of ruam.

Makes use of both parts of the bean harvest: the green beans are eaten, and their pods are dried and kept for soup.

Adenge makes a second food from the bean harvest. The seeds of fresh green beans are eaten, and the pods that held them are dried and stored to make a soup of their own. The Tiv cooking channel MDEVAAN has published a recipe video on YouTube under the title "How to prepare Adenge soup (Pretzel Bean Peel)", which shows that the dish is still cooked today.

Akiga Sai, writing in 1935, describes the two ways the Tiv eat beans, which match the two halves of this dish. "First, when they are still green and not fully ripened, women pluck the pods, cook, and eat them with their families." Otherwise the beans are left to ripen and dry in the pods before harvest, then spread on the drying platform and stored in a bean granary. He notes that some kinds of bean spread over the ground while others climb, and that climbing kinds do best on trees left standing when the farm was cleared. Beans were once so valued that a wife would carry even a tiny harvest home in a basket.

This archive's plant list identifies alev, the common Tiv word for beans, as the cowpea, Vigna unguiculata. According to the Useful Tropical Plants database, it is an annual climbing plant up to 4 metres tall and an abundant cropper that can give a harvest all year round in the tropics if it is sown every few months. Its immature pods can be eaten raw or cooked, its seeds green or dry, and its leaves cooked like spinach.

Note on sources: no written source was found for the preparation of adenge; the method given here is the archive owner's account.

Sources: information from the Tiv Heritage Archive owner (26 October 2026); MDEVAAN, "How to prepare Adenge soup (Pretzel Bean Peel)", YouTube; Akiga Sai, History of the Tiv (1935), translated by Harold M. Bergsma and Martin L. Akiga, Africa 85(4), 2015, chapter two; Useful Tropical Plants database (Fern, K.).

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.