Maize, kureke, eaten as a snack either roasted over the fire or boiled.
Fresh maize cobs.
The cobs are roasted over the fire or boiled.
Eaten as a snack; roasted corn is often eaten with roasted African pear (mzembe).
Roasting fresh maize in the field is an old Tiv pleasure: Akiga describes boys guarding the maize farms who secretly roasted the cobs they had been told not to eat.
The Tiv food guide tivpeople.com lists kureke i mgban and kureke i jiir, roasted and boiled corn, among Tiv snacks. This archive's dictionary gives the word as ikuleke, "corn, maize".
Akiga Sai, writing in 1935, describes maize farming in detail. He names varieties such as wanukpar, a dwarf maize that ripens quickly, and amenge, "dented teeth", named for its multicoloured seeds. Boys were set to guard the newly sown maize against bush-fowl and later against monkeys, and although they were strictly forbidden to eat it, they were good at pilfering: a boy would cut a stalk at the root, carry it into the bush, roast the cob and eat it at the farm, then fill in the hole so that nobody would know. When the maize was fully ripe, the head of the family cut one cob and placed it on the emblem of the akombo before the rest was harvested, and the best-formed cobs were kept as seed for the next season. Akiga adds that, unlike other peoples, the Tiv have few dishes made from maize, the best known being akpekpa, a bread of fresh maize and ground Bambara nuts.
Maize (Zea mays) was first domesticated in the Americas around 4,000 BC and has since spread to most of the world. According to the Useful Tropical Plants database, the immature seed can be eaten raw or cooked before it is fully ripe.
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, 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.