Iri Ji: the festival of the new yam

There is a rule in Igbo country that sounds strange until you understand it: you do not eat the new yam until the community says you may.

Not because it is unripe. The tubers have been ready for weeks. You wait because the yam is not just food. It is the crop the whole year was organised around, the measure by which a farmer was judged, and the thing you thanked God for before you thanked Him for anything else. Eating it early would be like opening presents before the birthday.

The day the waiting ends is Iri Ji: the eating of the new yam.

Why yam, of all things

Yam, ji, is called the king of crops in Igboland, and the title is not a figure of speech. A yam farm is brutal work. The mounds are built by hand, the vines have to be staked, the harvest is heavy and awkward, and a single tuber can weigh as much as a small child. A man who could fill a barn with them had proven something about himself that everyone could see.

So the yam became the crop that carried social meaning. Great yam farmers earned titles — Ezeji, the king of yams, or Diji, master of the yam. A man's barn, the tall rack of tubers tied to a frame, was a public statement of his industry. And the first yam of the season was not something to be eaten casually.

The yam is not the harvest. The yam is the proof that the year was not wasted.

What happens on the day

Every community sets its own date, usually between August and October, once the harvest is properly in. In the run-up, the last of the old yams are finished or cleared out. The new season is not allowed to start with old food in the house.

On the day itself, the first yam is offered before anyone eats. Who offers it depends on the town: the traditional ruler, the Eze or Igwe, or the oldest man in the community. He gives thanks to God, Chukwu, and to the ancestors for the harvest, and he eats the first piece. Only after that does the rest of the community eat.

Then it becomes a festival in the full sense. New clothes. Masquerades, the mmanwụ, appearing in the square. Dancing, drumming and in some towns wrestling, which was historically the sport a young man used to make his name. Families visit each other. Guests are fed until they cannot move. It is, in effect, the Igbo New Year, and it feels like one.

The food

The dish at the heart of it is almost stubbornly simple. Roasted yam, eaten with palm oil and pepper: ji na mmanụ. The tuber goes onto hot coals until the skin blackens and the flesh is soft and slightly smoky. It is broken open and dipped into red palm oil that has been warmed with chilli, salt and sometimes a little crayfish or onion.

That is it. After a year of work, the celebration is the plainest possible way of eating the thing you grew, because that is the point: the yam is the star and nothing is allowed to get in its way.

Around it, of course, is everything else. Pounded yam, made from the new crop for the first time, with the good soups: Ofe Owerri if the family can manage it, egusi, oha. Palm wine in quantity. Kola nut broken before the eating begins, as it is before anything important.

Iri Ji far from home

Igbo communities carry the festival with them. There are Iri Ji celebrations in Calgary, in Edmonton, across Canada and wherever enough Igbo families have settled to hire a hall. The yam is imported or bought from an African grocer, the roasting happens on a barbecue instead of a wood fire, and the masquerade may be a video call to the village. But the first yam is still offered before it is eaten, and someone still gives thanks in Igbo before the food is touched.

If you are invited to one, go. Wear something bright. Eat the roasted yam with your fingers, dipped in the oil, and understand that you are being shown the most important meal of somebody's year.

Read next: why every Igbo gathering starts with a kola nut.