Tigadegena (maafe proto-layer, native-bean stratum) Period COrigin theory CVerified

Mafé (tigadèguèna), enjoyed across Mali and Senegal, simmers meat and vegetables in a thick, peanut-butter-like sauce made from groundnuts. But this article is not about that mafé of today. It is about the older dish that came before the peanut ever reached West Africa.

Its central ingredient is the Bambara groundnut, a bean long established in West African soil. This legume, which ripens underground, has been grown here since ancient times and was on everyday tables from early on. Among the Mandinka and Bambara peoples of Mali, the bean was pounded, or simmered, into a thick stew.

What this older dish carries is the antiquity of a type of cooking: the groundnut stew itself. The idea of simmering ingredients in a thick, creamy bean sauce was deeply rooted here. Today's mafé can be understood as that same vessel filled with a newer groundnut, the peanut. Dazzled by the peanut in the leading role, one can easily overlook the older foundation behind it.

Two ways of telling the story surround the older layer of mafé. At first they seem to disagree, but listen closely and each is pointing to the antiquity of a different thing.

One traces the line of the dish far back. The Mandinka and Bambara made a groundnut stew from the homegrown Bambara groundnut before they ever knew the peanut—and this is no longer a matter of oral tradition alone. Starch grains of the Bambara groundnut have been recovered from an Early Iron Age site in Western Central Africa dating to roughly 2,500 years ago (Scientific Reports, 2022). Some two thousand years before the peanut reached West Africa, this homegrown bean was being cultivated and eaten, and that has been confirmed from the ground. West Africa, including the area around Timbuktu in Mali, is the bean's place of origin, and its long use in stews, porridges, and soups has been established through agronomic reviews and university-press scholarship alike. Seen as a type of dish—a thick simmered bean sauce—its antiquity is not in doubt.

The other view stresses the newness of today's mafé. The peanut at the centre of the modern dish is a South American crop, carried to West Africa around the sixteenth century by Portuguese and Spanish traders. The dish in its present peanut-forward form dates only from then, and peanut stew spread to the wider table as peanut cultivation expanded under colonial rule.

One point deserves untangling here. What is old is the type of dish—a groundnut stew made from a homegrown bean—not the name tigadèguèna itself. In Bamanankan the word breaks down into tige (peanut), dege (paste), and na (sauce); by its very construction it is a name coined after the peanut arrived. So what the older layer shares with today's mafé is the genre, not the name. The antiquity of the old bean stew must not be mistaken for the antiquity of today's mafé, nor of its present name. The evidence supporting this older layer is still limited, and neither view is pressed to a firm conclusion; both are set out as possibilities.