Ginger Production in Ham area northern Nigeria

      In a recent research, I came across information which might interest a number of individuals keen about  knowledge of their immediate environment. This knowledge is available but may not have been thought of by hundreds of us due to the thinking that we, people south of Kaduna, especially the Ham, known for massive production and trade in ginger have always had it with us since time immemorial.

    Undoubtedly, Nigeria indeed is currently rated one of the largest producers and exporters of ginger world-wide, especially the split-dried ginger (cut and dry one that we engage in daily). However the history of ginger production in our ancestral homeland is not as old as we would imagine it to be. On good authority, large-scale cultivation of ginger call 'chitta' which is a Hausa name for the crop, started in 1927 in the then southern Zaria (now Southern Kaduna) especially within the then Jemm'a federated districts where we are now located and in the neighbouring parts of the Plateau.

     According to P. N. Okwuowulu in a book, Ginger, The Genus Zingiber (2005) P.N. Ravindran and K. Nirmal Babu (eds.), an acclaim Journal Publication of Agriculture, the production is recorded to have begun during the search for a cash crop to generate internal trade around the area and this coincides with time the first Nok terracotta was excavated around 1928 (Erinle, 1988).

      Meanwhile, as far as the writer who is Ham born, from Ghikyaar village call Kurmin Jatau in Hausa, the Ham used to have something of the nature of ginger call Kpaatam! What has happened to this crop is now history since the introduction of ginger by the British colonial government in the second decade of the 1900s.

     Whilst the production flourished at the beginning though with huge stress of its processing as it was peeled and washed and washed and took long to dry unlike today when it is cut and dries easily, between the years 1927 to 1982, may be till date, the production for export had always fluctuated and ultimately declined due to poor prices of export markets and following attitude of Nigeria's government towards agriculture because of the economic boom of mineral oil in the country from the 1970s onward.

    When next you talk about ginger production, do not assume our great grand parents knew about these kinds or brands in vogue today. Indeed, shocking as it may seem, ginger production in our area is not more than 100 years now!

'Whoever neglects learning in his youth loses the Past, and is dead to the Future.' - Euripides (480 - 406 BC), Greek playwright.