Festival Mwaka Kogwa takes place at the end of July in the city of Makunduchi in the south of Zanzibar. This holiday is a local "New Year", - it marks the end of the old agricultural year and the beginning of a new one. The main theme of the festival is cleansing.

Local residents want to start the new year from scratch, and the logical beginning for all the men in the town is the struggle on banana stems. This is a kind of Zanzibar response to paintball.

Banana stems split into parts from the impact and disintegrate. A kind of grin is an attribute of a furious struggle between duelists. The festival allows its participants to get rid of all the rivalries through ritual aggression. It also burns a straw house, believing that all problems are burned with it.

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Festival Mwaka Kogwa