Overview
Iri ji, the new yam festival, marks the end of the farming cycle and the point at which the season's yams may be eaten. No one eats the new crop before the ceremony. It is the most important date in the Igbo year and is kept in related forms by many other Nigerian peoples.
History and origin
Yam is the crop around which much of southern Nigerian agriculture and status was organised, and the ban on eating the new harvest until it has been offered is old and widely observed. Igbo communities each hold their own iri ji, and versions exist among the Idoma, Tiv, Igala, Ebira and parts of Yorubaland, where the Yoruba equivalent is tied to Ifa and local oba calendars.
What happens
The oldest man in the community, or the igwe or a titled elder, offers the first yam in thanks, then eats it before anyone else. Yams are roasted and shared with palm oil. Masquerades come out, wrestling matches and dance competitions are held, and families display the size of their harvest. Relatives travel home from cities for it, which makes the period one of the heaviest travel seasons in the south east. The ceremony also functions as an annual reunion and an occasion for conferring titles.
When it takes place
August and September, varying by community, at the end of the rainy-season harvest.
Where a date is set by a traditional council, a lunar calendar or the harvest, it changes from year to year. Confirm locally before making plans around it.
Where to see it
Across the south east and the Middle Belt, with each town keeping its own date, Enugu State
The people behind it
IgboThe Igbo live mainly in south eastern Nigeria — Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo — with long-established communities in Delta and Rivers and traders settled in almost every Nigerian city. Historically most Igbo communities governed themselves without kings. Authority was shared between lineage heads, age grades, title societies such as ọzọ and village assemblies where free men debated until consensus formed, a structure colonial officials misread badly when they imposed warrant chiefs in the early twentieth century. Commerce is central to Igbo life. The markets of Onitsha, Aba and Nnewi are among the largest in West Africa, and the ìgbà bòi apprenticeship system, in which a young trader serves a master for years before being settled with capital of his own, has reproduced businesses across the country for generations. The Igbo are overwhelmingly Christian today, with Catholic and Pentecostal traditions both strong, though masquerade societies, the new yam festival and kola nut rites remain part of community life. The memory of the Biafran war of 1967 to 1970 and the rebuilding that followed still shapes how many Igbo describe their place in Nigeria.Spotted something wrong? Tell us.