The story is there, has always been there, that the Tiv people of central Nigeria give out their wives to guests to sleep with as part of their hospitality. It is part of the custom of the people, it is said.

It is a story that has fascinated everybody out there. The fascination lies in the sheer incredulity and absurdity of the mere thought of it. How a normal man can offer his woman, casually, to a guest is actually beyond the absurd. But it is custom, they say, and some customs can be absurd.

Nobody questions the logic or appropriateness, or even the veracity of customs. And that is so especially in Africa. We swallow everything with our propensity for superstition hook, line and sinker.

In Africa, our own stories have been told to us by foreigners. Our colonial masters. And they are stories that have shaped our minds and conditioned our thinking. We have been fed the inferiority of black against the superiority of white, and this has, unfortunately stuck to our consciousness.

In his interview with The Paris Review’s Jerome Brooks in 1994, the late literary icon, Chinua Achebe in answer to the circumstances that led him to become a writer stated that “until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter… once I realized that, I had to be a writer. I had to be that historian, it’s not one man’s job. It’s not one person’s job. But it is something we have to do”.

And truly, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart exposed Africa for the first time as a people who also have a culture. Before then, thanks to Josef Conrad’s book Heart of Darkness and other European portrayal of Africa in their literature, the people of the continent were thought of as savages who co-existed with animals in the jungles and still stay on tree tops without any form of social organisation like the Darwinian Neanderthal man of thousands of years ago.

In our fascinated glee to be part of the story of how a people give out their own wives to strangers or guests to sleep with, we have blindly ignored common sense logic. Men the world over from creation are known to have exceptions to their women no matter the affinity with another male.

This is even attributed to the male specie of every living animal. It is an inborn instinct in the male animal, especially man. Is there then something inherently different from the mental and anatomical composition of the Tiv man that the rest of the world do not know?

The world over, by natural inclination, a woman is sought after. To win a woman’s love, she has to be wooed. On her part, it is a natural feminine instinct to do small shakara before submission. In our African traditional pre-colonial societies when marriages were arranged between families, sometimes with the bride and groom having little or no say in the matter, it was even more serious.

Unlike this modern times when a man can toast a lady he fancies and two of them can come to a compromise, back then, to earn oneself a wife, one had to prove himself man enough and pay, in most cases, a handsome bride price. Marriage was, and still is a very serious institution in all African societies, and indeed all over the world.

It is therefore preposterous that a man who has gone to such extents to get himself a wife will now turn around to offer her cheaply, like a piece of kola for the conjugal enjoyment of another man. In our uncritical haste, we have failed to question the fact that even if the Tiv are so dumb and so sub-human to offer their visitors their own wives, whether the supposed visitors and guests are also always that dumb and accept the offers and sleep with their host’s wives right in their houses?

Just like the Europeans who tell the African story their own way, many of the stereotypes which we are still trying to correct to this day, sadly, that is how Africans themselves swallowed stories against themselves hook, line and sinker and even make jest of themselves because of tribal differences.

It still remains a matter of conjecture that no one single individual has ever come out to bear witness that he has been so entertained by a Tiv man nor has any single non-Tiv lady married to a Tiv man ever come out to say she was ever offered to a guest. Somehow, everybody hears it said but none has ever witnessed it. What in street parlance we call “dem say, dem say”. A myth. A fallacy.

The very interesting fact about this whole saga is that the story is widely circulated by only the non-Tiv speaking people and not by the Tiv themselves whom it is supposedly their custom. Tragically, the narrative has found its way into literature, all authored, of course, by non-Tiv.

There is even a Nollywood film that is based on the myth. One of the most audaciously deceptive and misleading contribution on the topic is the journal article by two co-called academics Regina Arisi and Patrick Oromareghake whom the Tiv Traditional Council should use as scape goats by claiming heavy damages from should they fail to prove their assertions in the court of law. Their piece titled “Cultural violence and the African woman” is published in the African Research Review journal.

In the said piece, the duo stated inter alia “in the Tiv culture of Benue State, men offer their wives to august visitors sleeping over in the men’s house in demonstration of the host’s regard for such a friend or visitor. The wife that is offered usually does not have any prerogative on the issue other than to make sure she satisfies the visitor on bed that night. Rather than spite such a culture, married women look forward to the visit of strong, macho and herculean men, especially, wives married to men with diminishing strength.”

The story of the Tiv entertaining visitors with their wives has gone on for so long and has become so entrenched that it now runs the risk of any contrary narrative considered a damage control measure. But one inalienable fact in the whole saga remains that the tale is very enthusiastically spread by only the non-Tiv with the unabashed gusto of excited children.

Of course, while nobody openly admits it, the sheer incongruity is not lost on both the story teller and the audience. So it is a particular tale told with that mischievous glimmer in the eye and knowing smile by the sides of the mouth that is also not lost on anybody. It is even curious to the Tiv themselves that as a people, they themselves also hear that aspect of their own culture from outsiders and strangers of the tribe.

To the typically proud Tiv man, the ‘culture’ is a direct contradiction of his persona. It is a story that shames the entire tribe’s pride and self-esteem. This supposed custom attributed to the Tiv people is one that even animals will scorn. The most amorous mammal on Earth is the Bonobo monkey. Known to mate as casually and as frequently as before every meal time, yet the males are known to be very protective of their female, and would lounge at any that dare comes close.

However, as unfair as it sounds, the Tiv people have the most blame in the spread of the tale. Joseph Goebbels, Second World war Nazi Germany’s Minister of propaganda is famous for his postulation that “if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it, and you will even come to believe it yourself.”

Laying credence to this assertion, Psychologist Pei Ying Chua in her treatise published on November 4, 2021 under the caption ‘The Illusion of Truth Effect’ states that “The illusory truth effect (also known as the illusion of truth, truth effect, or the reiteration effect) is the tendency to believe in false information after hearing it repeatedly.” The Tiv tarried for too long in disproving the lie.

At most, feeble and isolated efforts are individually made now and then. Unfortunately, as time has proven, that is not enough. For a misconception of such magnitude, one that puts them down before the world and impugns at the very core of their dignity, it is surprising that they have not deemed it fit to make a deliberate effort to correct it until it is now spiraling out of control.

Letting hell loose whenever someone out there let it out and retreating back into their shells to wait for the next misguided public utterance is exactly the wrong way to go. It has not stopped the stereotype and never will. The whispers behind their backs is even more damaging than the public jests.

As custodians of the Tiv culture, the Tiv Traditional Council really ought to have since risen to the challenge to defend the integrity of the tribe. Likewise the Tiv socio-cultural umbrella organisation, the Mdzough u Tiv (MUT) and leaders of the tribe should have risen up long before now to correct the damaging lie. No man wants to pass a legacy of shame to his offspring and this is a matter that has put the very dignity of the Tiv woman to ridicule and dishonour.

A tale that not only defames, but ridicules her entire womanhood. A cruel tale that not only implies, but pointedly tells the world that a Tiv woman’s honour is so worthless that it is not even for sale, but offered for free to visitors. It is an insult that touches at the very core of the Tiv race as a whole and which ought to have been taken seriously enough to provoke the Tiv war cry: Hoon se kpe! Hoon se kpe!!

Putting that misconception permanently to rest should not even be that difficult if they go about it the right way. Call your scholars together and charge them to correct the stereotype through their own publications in journals.

Let them write their own stories. Act their own films about it. Let them be their own historians. Hold media talks to discountenance the lie. Cleanse the tribe of such poisonous toga. It is a debt they owe their posterity.