Cultural Ceremony · Late July
Mwaka Kogwa — Shirazi New Year
A village settles a year of grievances with banana stalks, then feasts.
Makunduchi, southern ZanzibarPeak: Four days around the Shirazi new year
The event
Zanzibar's oldest festival, kept in the village of Makunduchi: ritual mock fights with banana stalks to clear the year's quarrels, a hut burned to carry off misfortune, then singing, food and open houses.
Mwaka Kogwa marks the new year of the Shirazi calendar, brought to the coast by Persian settlers a thousand years ago, and Makunduchi keeps it more completely than anywhere else on the island. Men from the village's two halves fight each other with banana stalks — a stylised, deliberately harmless brawl that exists so grudges from the past year can be spent in public and let go.
A ritual hut is then built and burned; the direction the smoke leans is read for the year ahead. Afterwards every house in the village is open, women sing in the fields in fine dress, and food comes out until it is gone. Visitors are genuinely welcome — being turned away from a doorway is considered the household's bad luck, not yours.
It is a real village festival rather than a staged one, so we keep groups small, brief you properly on conduct, and travel with a Makunduchi-connected guide.
What you actually get
- Banana-stalk mock fights that settle the year's quarrels
- The burning of the ritual hut and the reading of the smoke
- Open houses, singing in the fields, and village feasting
- Small groups with a Makunduchi-connected guide
- Combines with the Great Migration in the same month
Timed to this event
Journeys built around it
These itineraries run in or overlap the Late July window. Dates flex to your flights — tell us your arrival and we route backwards from it.
Elsewhere on the calendar
See all events →June to October
The Great Migration
Between June and October roughly two million wildebeest, zebra and gazelle push north through the Serengeti and pile up at the Mara River. We camp where the herds actually are and move as they move.
- Season
- June to October
- Where
- Serengeti
- Journeys
- 4 built around it
January to March
Calving Season on the Ndutu Plains
On the short-grass plains around Ndutu the wildebeest drop nearly half a million calves inside a few weeks. It is the most concentrated wildlife spectacle in Africa and the best big-cat action of the year.
- Season
- January to March
- Where
- Southern Serengeti & Ndutu, Ngorongoro Conservation Area
- Journeys
- 4 built around it
Hold your place for Mwaka Kogwa — Shirazi New Year
Late July fills earliest. Tell us your window and we will confirm what is still open.