January sits in the middle of the Mozambican summer. The Southern Ocean is quiet, so the swell that reaches this coast is small and occasional, and the beach spends most of the month at knee to waist height.
The thing to plan around is not the wave. The Mozambique Channel runs a cyclone season from November to April with its peak between January and March, and southern Mozambique is where they come ashore. In practice that rarely means a cyclone on your week; it regularly means several days of heavy rain, a road that is briefly unusable and a flight that moves. Anybody booking January should book with that possibility priced in.
The water is at 28°C, its warmest of the year, and the village is at its busiest: the South African holidays run through the first half of the month and Tofo is the beach they come to.
