A popular Tiv soup made from the flower buds of the Genger tree. It has a distinctive flavour and aroma, and is valued both as a regular food and for its medicinal reputation among the Tiv people.
Genger flower buds, local seasonings, optional meat or fish
Genger flower buds are cooked with local seasonings and optional meat or fish to produce a flavourful soup.
Served with pounded yam (Ruam Kumen) and other staple foods.
Known as both a traditional food and a medicinal soup. The Genger tree is culturally significant among the Tiv, and its flower buds are used in cooking as well as in traditional medicine.
Genger is the Tiv name for the red-flowered silk-cotton tree, Bombax costatum (see the Genger entry under plants). It is a deciduous tree usually 10 to 25 metres tall, though it hardly exceeds 6 metres in the Sahel, with a spiny trunk covered in thick, corky bark. It grows in savanna, cleared forest and dry woodland from Senegal across Ghana and Nigeria to southern Chad.
The Useful Tropical Plants database calls it a true multipurpose tree, providing medicines, fibre, food, oil and timber. The part used in cooking is the calyx, the cup at the base of the flower: it is dried, ground into a powder and used as an ingredient in sauces, and in parts of West Africa the tree is sometimes planted for this edible calyx. The young fruit is also dried and used in meals, unripe fruit has been used to make a drink, and the fibre from the seed pods was once exported. The seed oil, with its high protein content and polyunsaturated fats, is considered potentially suitable for eating.
The same source warns that the tree is said to be disappearing from the Sahel and Guinean woodlands of its range, which makes the knowledge of how to use it, kept alive in dishes like this soup, all the more worth recording.
The Tiv food guide tivpeople.com gives a detailed account of genger soup. The tree is found mostly in Tivland, in places such as Konshisha, Gwer East, Gboko, Vandeikya and Tarka, and the soup is seasonal, eaten from late November to early April; many believe the genger loses its rich taste once the rains come. The buds are picked, the petals removed and the shells dried for days or weeks until brown, then pounded into the powder used for the soup. A contributed recipe cooks the powder with water and a little potash (mtsem), then adds a blended paste of locust beans, gbaaye, fresh pepper, kyoho and black pepper (yiye), with fish, salt and seasoning; the whole takes about an hour, and the soup is best served with pounded yam. The guide records that genger soup is said to be medicinal, that a well-made pot keeps for up to ten days, that it is shared between women to make peace, and that Tiv brides cook it for their new husbands as the first meal after a traditional marriage held in the genger season.
Note on sources: this entry speaks of the flower buds; the botanical source names the calyx of the flower as the part used in sauces.
Sources: tivpeople.com, "Tiv Food" (Internet Archive copy, 25 January 2025); MDEVAAN, "Genger soup recipe", YouTube; Useful Tropical Plants database (Fern, K.), citing Burkill, The Useful Plants of West Tropical Africa, and Achigan-Dako et al., Traditional Vegetables in Benin (2009).
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.