Tiv

Tiv, people living on both sides of the Benue River in Nigeria; they speak a language of the Benue-Congo branch of the Niger-Congo family.

The Tiv are subsistence farmers whose main crops are yams, millet, and sorghum, all of which are eaten as porridge or are made more palatable by their combination in sauces and stews. Although goats and chickens are plentiful, few cattle are kept because of the tsetse fly. The polygynous Tiv family occupies a cluster of round huts surrounding a reception hut; brothers usually live next to one another.

Tiv social organization is based on patrilineages that are closely associated with particular geographic features; in segmentary lineage systems such as the Tiv’s, a given lineage may be associated, more or less exactly, to a particular village, a group of lineages to a larger district, and so on. Genealogies go back many generations to a single ancestor; the descendants (through the male line) of each person in the genealogy thus form a territorial kinship group. The force of patrilineal descent, while dominant in Tiv institutions, is balanced by institutions such as age grades (groups of men of about the same age who provide mutual assistance and allies against lineage pressure), cooperative groups, and institutionalized friendships. Although traditionally the Tiv had no chiefs (political decisions were made by lineage elders), the British administration established a paramount chief in 1948. The Tiv’s complex system of exchange marriage was outlawed in 1927 and was replaced by marriage with bridewealth.

Some Tiv have converted to Christianity, and a lesser number have adopted Islam; but their traditional religion, based on the manipulation of forces (akombo) entrusted to humans by a creator god, remains strong. The akombo are manifested in certain symbols or emblems and in diseases that they create. An organization of elders who have the ability to manipulate these forces meets at night to repair those manifestations of akombo (e.g., epidemics) that affect the group; these phenomena require human sacrifice or its metaphorical equivalent. The Tiv numbered about 2,500,000 in the late 20th century.