Festival Tufo

Festival Tufo centers on tufo, a women's dance and song tradition of Mozambique's northern Swahili coast, most closely associated with Ilha de Mocambique and the wider Nampula coastline including Angoche. Groups of women in matching capulana cloth perform synchronized movements to frame-drum rhythms and call-and-response singing, a practice rooted in the region's Muslim Macua communities.

Along Mozambique's northern coast, where centuries of Indian Ocean trade linked Ilha de Mocambique and nearby Angoche to Arabia, Persia, and the wider Swahili world, the Macua-speaking communities that settled this stretch of shoreline developed a distinctly coastal, Islamic-inflected culture quite different from the Tsonga and Ronga traditions of the far south.