DAR ES SALAAM: MEXICO’S Julián Quiñones scored the very first goal of the 2026 FIFA World Cup. He found the back of the net for the Mexican national team in the 9th minute of their opening match against South Africa on June 11, 2026.
No name has been used globally to define Quiñones’ hairstyle, but to Tanzanians, it is widely known as Kiduku.
For this year, hairstyle is at the land it originated as in all three countries hosting the World Cup; Canada, Mexico and the USA are the homes to Amerindians.
Like in the four past World Cup finals, this unnamed Amerindian hairstyle has continued to dominate the heads of the football players representing countries in the ongoing World Cup finals in Canada, the US and Mexico.
The hairstyle found its way into football through the Manchester United legend, David Beckham, when he shaved his head in a Mohawk hairstyle.
English media outlets called it Mohawk, but Tanzanian youth named Kiduku and it was accompanied with a special dance style. Still, however, it is hard to establish a connection between the Kiduku dance style and the Mohawk hairstyle.
The hairstyle was taken from the Novel and a movie titled “The Last of the Mohicans” written by James Fenimore Cooper in 1826.
Kiduku, as a dance style, has long faded from the limelight today, but it bounced back a few years ago when Diamond Plantumz reintroduced it in Yope Remix by Innossy B.
What is so hypnotising in Yope Remix, according to the views of many youthful music fans in Tanzania and Kenya, the majority of them school children, is Diamond’s tiptoe dancing style, popularly known as Kiduku.
Since the early 2000s, the Kiduku style has been one of the most popular forms of dance in Tanzania, but only kids could perfectly manage it.
“It is very difficult to administer it for a fully grown-up person since it requires one to dance on tiptoe, hence only light-weighted kids managed it,” noted Tanzanian Reggae legend, Innocent Galinoma back in mid-2000s.
Kiduku dance won the hearts of the children because they are the only ones who can manage to dance it while standing on tiptoe. “Only youth aged below 15 years managed to perform it easily,” he added.
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Even Diamond stood on his tiptoes for a fraction of a second when he danced his remarkable part in Yope Remix. Despite its bizarre look and mastering complications, Kiduku dance has made an immense contribution to promoting Bongo Flava which has now won a global appeal.
Kiduku dance accompanied many great Bongo Flava hits released in the mid2000s from Marlaw’s Pii Pii to Ali Kiba’s “Cinderella”. Kiduku was already widely danced when Diamond Platnumz released his eponymous hit, “Moyo Wangu”.
Owing to its physical nature, Kiduku has lost its grip in today’s Bongo Flava hits, but it is still danced in Singeli, a suburban music genre played by energetic performers and a hairstyle favoured by artists and football players. Every Tanzanian today knows Kiduku as a dance style for children and the hairstyle of the Amerindian.
Tanzania, whose majority of residents are fans of Manchester United, named David Beckham’s Mohawk hairstyle Kiduku and it became both dance and hairstyle from the early 2010s to the early 2020s.
According to English media outlets, David Beckham’s Mohawk style went viral and became a global issue after the then Man United Coach, Sir Alex Ferguson forced Beckham to shave off his Mohawk style in Wembley toilets.
The Mohawk or Mohican hairstyle is a hairstyle in which, in the most common variety, both sides of the head are shaven, leaving a strip of noticeably longer hair in the centre. Mohawk hairstyles have existed for thousands of years.
The style re-emerged in the 2000s, with some of the popularly known wearers being Travis vocalist Fran Healy, David Beckham, Elijah Wood and Mario Balotelli.
For historians and book readers, Kiduku, as both dance and hairstyles, seems to draw close to “King Solomon’s Mines” (Mashimo ya Mfalme Suleiman in the Swahili version) and The Last of the Mohicans.
King Solomon’s Mines (1885) is a popular novel by the English Victorian adventure writer and fabulist Sir H. Rider Haggard. It tells of a search of an unexplored region of Africa by a group of adventurers led by Allan Quatermain for the missing brother of Sir Henry Curtis, one of the parties.
The central attraction of the novel is Gagool (Gagula in his Swahili version), who is described as a wizened monkeylike creature.
She is the wise woman of the Kukuanas who performed a tiptoe dance in her witch-finding exercise to locate men who opposed King Twala and had them executed.
The Swahili version of King Solomon’s Mines is among the most-read books and its chief characters; Allan Quatermain and Gagool remain among the most admired characters to date. It is Kiduku’s tiptoe dancing style that makes it similar to what King Solomon’s Mines described as Gagool’s witch-hunting dance.
Still, besides its controversial nature, Kiduku as dance and hairstyle are clean cultural practices now being cherished by fans of music and arts across the globe.
“It is baffling how Tanzanians manage to quickly respond to the global trends,” once echoed Tatu Nane bassist, Ted Mbarak after finding Tanzanian music fans familiar to his thumping style.
He said by then in the late 1980, when Tanzanian music was still glued to rumba styled dance music, thumping style was not on local music plate.
“We were playing at a bar in Temeke, when fans shouted …punguza kibakubaku… and that taught that thumping style3 is called “Kibakubaku”.
I came to respect Tanzanians for that,” he called during the band’s performance at Rungwe Oceanic in 1987. Unknown to Ted Mbaraka, Chaka Khan’s” Ain’t No Body” brought the first glimpse of thumping style to Tanzania in early 1980s.
“Ain’t Nobody” was released in 1983 by Warner Bros. and then became a hit single and the band’s official bassist was Bobby Watson Legendary American bassist and singer, Larry Graham, is widely recognised as the inventor of the slap bass technique, which he personally calls “thumpin’ and pluckin”.
As a member of Sly and the Family Stone and later as the frontman of Graham Central Station, his percussive bass playing revolutionised funk, soul and popular music.
The Origin of “Thumpin’ and Pluckin’”The Problem: In the 1960s, while playing in a duo with his mother in a San Francisco club, their drummer left. To compensate for the missing rhythm, Graham had to get creative to fill out the bottom end of their sound.
The Technique: He started striking the strings with his thumb to mimic the thud of a kick drum, and snapping the higher strings with his index or middle finger to imitate a snare drum.
This accidental innovation completely changed the role of the bass, bringing it from the background rhythm section to the driving lead force of the groove. What Ted Mbarak didn’t realise then was that the thumping style was heard in some hits, most notably in DDC Mlimani Park Orchestra’s hit “Conjesta”.
The band’s bassist, Julius Mzeru, is credited with having injected a slap technique in the song. Miguel Suleyman is a Tanzanian ethnomusicologist based in Dar es Salaam.