By Uji A Iliyasu
The Ngas People of Plateau State: A Visitor’s Guide
Third in a continuing series on the ethnic nationalities of Plateau State, Nigeria.
INTRODUCTION
On the southeastern edge of the Jos Plateau, where the granite highlands begin their descent toward the lowlands, lies Yil Ngas, Ngasland, home to the Ngas people, also known as the Angas or Kerang. Centred on the town of Pankshin and spreading across the districts of Ampang, Amper and Kabwir, with a further presence in neighbouring Bauchi State, the Ngas are counted among the largest ethnic nationalities on the Jos Plateau, with a 1952 census once placing them as the single largest group in the whole of Plateau State.
For the visitor, Ngasland offers a striking landscape of hills and plains, a language and culture with deep roots in Central Sudanic migration history, and a community whose farming rhythms, harvest festivals and traditional courts remain very much alive alongside a strong, long-established Christian presence.
SHORT HISTORY
Ngas oral tradition traces the people’s origins far beyond the Jos Plateau itself, describing a migration that began in Egypt, Sudan or Chad before the community settled for a time in the Borno region of northeastern Nigeria.
From Borno, ancestral Ngas groups are said to have set out sometime between 1100 and 1350 AD, moving southward in search of fertile land to farm and pasture for their animals until they reached the highlands they would eventually name Yil Ngas.
As the migrating groups pushed onto the Jos Plateau, they split into sub-communities, each settling under its own early leadership: the community at Kabwir was led by a chief named Gwallam, while the Amper settlers followed a chief called Kendim, with further groups establishing themselves across the Ampang district and the wider highlands.
This process of splintering and resettlement shaped a Ngas identity that, while unified by language and custom, has always carried strong local and district-level distinctions between hill communities and plains communities.
By the twentieth century, the Ngas had become one of the dominant peoples of the Jos Plateau, and their historical and political significance to modern Nigeria is considerable: the Ngas people count among their number General Yakubu Gowon, the former Nigerian head of state, whose ethnicity is Ngas.
Twentieth-century contact with British colonial administration and, in parallel, with Christian missionary activity, reshaped much of Ngas religious and social life, a transformation documented closely by scholars studying the community’s shift from traditional religion toward Christianity.
Despite these changes, Ngas communities have maintained strong historical relationships, including intermarriage, with neighbouring groups such as the Tarok, with shared festivals and mourning customs pointing to centuries of close contact even amid linguistic differences, and with a notable 2004 peace conference standing as a marker of the two communities’ commitment to resolving tension through dialogue rather than conflict.
LANGUAGE
The Ngas language sits within the Chadic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family, specifically the West Chadic Angas-Sura (or Angas) group, making it a linguistic relative of nearby languages such as Mwaghavul and Bwol rather than of Bantu-derived languages spoken by some other Plateau communities. Ngas has two recognised dialects, Hill Ngas and Plain Ngas, reflecting the geographic and historical split between the mountain and lowland branches of the community, though speakers from different villages can generally understand one another despite minor variations in accent and pronunciation. Interestingly, Ngas has also absorbed significant influence from Tarok over centuries of neighbourly contact, a linguistic fingerprint of the close historical relationship between the two peoples. Estimates from the late 1990s put native Ngas speakers at around 400,000, and the language remains one of the major languages of Plateau State, actively spoken at home, in local trade, in church services, and increasingly recorded in scholarly and religious literature. Visitors will find Hausa and English useful for getting around Pankshin and larger towns, but a greeting in Ngas is a reliable icebreaker in the surrounding villages.
FOODS
Farming has always defined Ngas material life, and the community’s food culture follows directly from what its farmers grow on the hills and plains of Ngasland: guinea corn (sorghum), millet, maize and a variety of legumes form the backbone of the everyday diet, prepared into thick porridges and soups in patterns familiar across the Jos Plateau but seasoned and prepared according to local Ngas custom.
Livestock — cattle, goats and other animals — round out the traditional Ngas economy, reflecting the community’s dual heritage as both farmers and herders inherited from its ancestors’ long migration south in search of land to farm and animals to raise. Harvest time carries particular culinary significance, since the major Ngas festivals are timed to the agricultural calendar and involve communal feasting on the season’s new grain, making the period around harvest the richest time for a visitor to sample Ngas food culture at its most festive and abundant.
CLIMATE/WEATHER
Ngasland’s climate reflects its position straddling the hill country and plains of the southeastern Jos Plateau, generally milder and cooler than Nigeria’s far north but warmer than the highest points of the central Plateau around Jos itself. The area follows the familiar Middle Belt pattern of a wet season running from roughly April to October, which brings the rainfall essential to sorghum, millet and maize cultivation, followed by a dry season from November through March marked by the dust-laden harmattan winds and cooler nights, particularly in the hill districts.
Visitors travelling to the hill communities of Ngasland should be prepared for a noticeably cooler and breezier climate than the lowland plains areas around Amper, and should plan road travel around the rains, since the wet season, while good for the farms and scenery, can complicate travel on rural roads leading into the hills.
As with much of Plateau State, the period bridging the end of the rains and the start of harvest, from around September into November, tends to be both the most comfortable time to travel and the richest time culturally, coinciding with the community’s major farming festivals.
MARRIAGE
Marriage among the Ngas has traditionally been structured around family and lineage, with a documented historical role for maternal uncles in marriage matters, reflecting the importance of extended kinship networks beyond the immediate household in validating and supporting a union.
Historically, Ngas society accommodated both monogamous and polygynous marriage, with the particular arrangement often shaped by family status, religious practice and personal choice, a pattern that shifted considerably over the twentieth century as Christianity became the dominant faith across Ngas communities.
As elsewhere in Plateau State, marriage negotiations, formal introductions and bridewealth arrangements between families remain central to the process, with church weddings today commonly layered onto these older, family-centred customs rather than replacing them outright.
Intermarriage between the Ngas and neighbouring groups, particularly the Tarok, has a long history and is frequently cited as one of the threads binding the two communities together across generations.
BURIALS
Ngas burial and mourning customs are deeply woven into the community’s spiritual worldview, historically centred on beliefs about ancestral spirits, the “living dead,” and continued connection between the departed and their descendants. Traditional Ngas cosmology includes concepts around what some scholars have translated as reincarnation or resurrection — the idea that the deceased remain connected to and can return to influence the world of the living — reflecting a broader African religious understanding of death as transition rather than absolute ending.
Comparative research on Ngas and neighbouring Tarok mourning customs has found notable similarities between the two groups, including mourning periods observed over roughly three days, alongside specific traditions surrounding burial rites and the formal recognition of ancestral spirits, underscoring centuries of shared cultural exchange between the communities despite their different linguistic roots.
As Christianity has become the majority religion among the Ngas, church funeral rites — services, hymns and formal burial in consecrated ground — have become standard practice in most communities, generally observed alongside, rather than in place of, older customs of communal mourning and respect for ancestry.
Gen. Yakubu Gowon
INDUSTRY/LIVELIHOOD
Agriculture remains, as it has been since the community’s earliest settlement of the Plateau highlands, the foundation of Ngas economic life, with sorghum, millet, maize and a range of vegetables cultivated across both the hill terraces of districts like Kabwir and the flatter farmland of the Amper plains. Livestock rearing continues alongside crop farming, sustaining a mixed agricultural economy that has adapted relatively little in its basic structure even as markets, transport and processing have modernised around it.
Pankshin functions as the principal commercial and administrative centre for Ngasland, hosting markets that draw traders and produce from across the surrounding districts, and serving as the seat of local government and traditional authority. Beyond farming, Ngas communities today are well represented in Nigeria’s civil service, military, church leadership and professional classes, a legacy in part of the community’s early and extensive engagement with Christian missionary education during the colonial period, with prominent Ngas figures, including a former Nigerian head of state, illustrating the community’s broader national significance well beyond the boundaries of Plateau State.
FESTIVALS/CULTURAL LIFE
Ngas cultural life turns on the agricultural calendar, and its foremost celebration, known as Tsafi Tar or Mos Tar, is a harvest festival marking the close of one farming season and the opening of the next. A distinctive feature of the festival is a ritual moment known as “Shooting the Moon,” performed as part of the wider harvest celebrations and understood locally as a symbolic marker of the season’s turn.
These festivals bring Ngas communities together across district lines in music, dance and communal feasting, and share notable common ground with the Imalkan harvest festival of the neighbouring Tarok, both events underscoring how central the farming cycle is to identity and celebration across southeastern Plateau State generally. For a visitor, timing a trip around the harvest festival season offers by far the richest window into Ngas communal life, tradition and hospitality.
PRACTICAL NOTES FOR VISITORS
Pankshin, roughly 90 kilometres southeast of Jos, is the natural base for exploring Ngasland, offering reasonable road connections to the state capital along with access to the surrounding hill and plains districts of Kabwir, Ampang and Amper. Visitors should plan travel with the seasons in mind, favouring the drier months for easier movement between hill communities, while recognising that a visit timed around the post-harvest festival period offers the fullest cultural experience. As with any community where traditional beliefs around ancestry and spirit continue to hold real meaning alongside Christian faith, visitors should approach burial sites, ancestral customs and local ritual practice with sensitivity, seeking guidance from local hosts before observing or photographing ceremonies.
Given the long, closely intertwined history between the Ngas and their Tarok neighbours — through intermarriage, shared festivals and, more recently, formal peace-building — a visit to Ngasland pairs naturally with time spent in neighbouring Tarok communities for travellers seeking a fuller picture of southeastern Plateau State’s rich and interconnected ethnic landscape.
Compiled as part of an ongoing series profiling the ethnic nationalities of Plateau State, Nigeria.
References
Joshua Project. “Angas in Nigeria.” joshuaproject.net
Wikipedia. “Angas people.” en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia. “Ngas language.” en.wikipedia.org
Wikipedia. “Angas languages.” en.wikipedia.org
Wambutda, Daniel Nimcir. A Study of Conversion Among the Angas of Plateau State of Nigeria. Referenced via Google Books.
“Ngas and Taroh People of Plateau State.” academia.edu
Asogwa, Nicholas U., Christopher I. Asogwa, and Nicholas O. Ugwu. “Ngas Concept of Tuput: Reincarnation or Resurrection?” SAGE Open 11.3 (2021). Cited in “Culture and the Divine Message of the Ngas People of Nigeria,” researchgate.net
“Tribes in Nigeria – The Ngas Tribe.” articles.connectnigeria.com
“Angas people.” 101lasttribes.com
Compiled as part of an ongoing series profiling the ethnic nationalities of Plateau State, Nigeria.