There is nothing significant about the village most of the time of a year except one day in late July when loads of people flock to this tiny village, to see the villagers beating each other with stems of banana trees.
Sounds odd? This event is actually a part of a festival called Mwaka Kogwa which is unique to Makunduchi.
I'm not familiar with its history, but from what I know, the stick beating started as a mean to vent grievances between the villagers once a year. Violence or displaying anger towards someone else is considered immoral in Tanzania. Although I've seen a few exceptions in the past, people here are generally reserved about expressing their anger. Confrontations go as far as lightly heated arguements and nothing more, and even during these instances they would slip in jokes and exchange laughter.
I'm not familiar with its history, but from what I know, the stick beating started as a mean to vent grievances between the villagers once a year. Violence or displaying anger towards someone else is considered immoral in Tanzania. Although I've seen a few exceptions in the past, people here are generally reserved about expressing their anger. Confrontations go as far as lightly heated arguements and nothing more, and even during these instances they would slip in jokes and exchange laughter.
That doesn't mean that people don't have feuds or grievances against a particular individual. So sometime in the past, people in Makunduchi came up with an idea that once a year everyone would gather up in a field, divide themselves into two teams (Villagers on the north side and south side) and beat each other up with banana stems and vent their anger towards each other.
I missed this event last year because of my work, but how could I leave this place without watching something that interesting? So this year I took a day off and headed to Makunduchi!
This is the "battle" field. Very calm at this moment, but the anticipation of visitors and tourists there was already high.
The villagers (mostly men at this point) entered the field and jogged around it for a while.
Then the fights broke out!
Sometimes in pairs...
and sometimes in groups.
By the look of it, while there were exceptions, the general rules seemed to be;
1. Fights are only in one on one (even they are in groups).
2. A fight ends when one of the fighters no longer has rigid banana stem.
3. No surprise attacks. Both fighters need to agree to fight before they start.
Fighting continued for about 1 hour and then they started building a small hut on the field which is shown at the center of this photo behind the crowd.
A man went into the hut and came running out immediately after the hut was set on fire. I do not know the significance of it but that marked the end of this event.
Well, I'm glad I saw it this time!
