[Marxism] Swaziland disgrace

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

I reviewed "Without the King," the movie referred to in the article 
below, here: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/04/25/without-the-king/

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NY Times, September 6, 2008
The Costs of a Living in a Fairy Tale Kingdom
By BARRY BEARAK

LUDZIDZINI, Swaziland — Once upon a time, a young and handsome king 
ruled over a land of mountainous splendor near the southern tip of 
Africa. He liked to get married, and as the years passed he took 13 
wives, each of them a great beauty.

His countrymen wanted His Majesty to be happy, but some also thought so 
many spouses were an extravagance for a poor, tiny nation. After all, 
the king, Mswati III, often provided these wives a retinue, a palace and 
a new BMW.

A great event was soon forthcoming — on Saturday, in fact. To prepare 
for the day — the 40-40 Celebration, so-named to honor the king’s 40th 
birthday and the nation’s 40th year of independence — a new 15,000-seat 
stadium was built and a fleet of top-of-the-line BMW sedans was ordered 
for the comfort of visiting dignitaries.

Once again, some people wondered how the kingdom, Swaziland, could 
afford the expense. Some 1,500 of them grumpily marched in protest 
through the capital after news reports said that several of the queens 
and their entourages had gone on an overseas shopping trip aboard a 
chartered plane.

Indeed, as the big day neared, other protests drew thousands more into 
the streets of the country’s two biggest cities. “The king spends our 
money and is not answerable to anyone!” complained Mario Masuku, the 
head of an outlawed political party and a familiar figure of Swazi 
discontent.

The rowdiest of the demonstrators flung rocks, looted goods from 
sidewalk vendors and even set off a few small explosions. Others made 
impromptu placards with torn up cardboard. “Down with 40-40!” read one, 
while another demanded, “Democracy now!” A few protesters chanted things 
meant to make rich people feel guilty: “My mother was a kitchen girl. My 
father was a garden boy. That’s why I’m a socialist.”

The angriest of them went so far as to insist the nation had little to 
celebrate. Yes, Swazis have enjoyed decades of peace and are rightfully 
proud of their culture. But poverty has entrapped two-thirds of the 
people, leaving hundreds of thousands of them malnourished. And these 
days death casually sweeps away even the strong. The country has one of 
the worst rates of H.I.V.. infection in the world. Life expectancy has 
fallen from 60 years in 1997 to barely half that now. Nearly a third of 
all children have lost a parent.

“How can the king live in luxury while his people suffer?” asked Siphiwe 
Hlophe, a human rights activist. “How much money does he need, anyway?”

That question was as confounding as it was impertinent. In the 
government’s latest budget, about $30 million was set aside for “royal 
emoluments.”

But surely the king’s income exceeds that, people said. The royal family 
also controls a corporate business empire “in trust for the nation,” 
investing in sugar cane, commercial property and a newspaper. 
Forbes.com, which is fond of ranking the rich elite, recently listed 
Mswati III as the world’s 15th wealthiest monarch, estimating his 
fortune at $200 million.

But is this not the way of the world? The king, after all, is the king. 
The poor, after all, are the poor. Percy Simelane, the government’s 
spokesman, was quoted by Agence France-Presse last week as saying: 
“Poverty has been with us for many years. We cannot then sit by the 
roadside and weep just because the country is faced with poverty. We 
have made great strides as a country that gives us pleasure in 
celebrating 40 years of independence and the king’s birthday.”

Indeed, most of Swaziland’s 1.1 million people love their monarch. God 
gave the country to the king, many of them say, and the king was given 
to the people by God. Mswati III’s father, Sobhuza II, had been 
especially revered. He was more frugal than his son, transporting the 
royal family in buses instead of BMWs. But he too liked to get married. 
It was said that he took 70 wives, though some put the number as high as 
110.

Sobhuza II was king when the nation shed the yoke of colonialism, 
finally free of Great Britain yet left with a British-style 
constitution. The esteemed monarch did not abide this document for long. 
In 1973, he dissolved Parliament and rid himself of the annoyance of 
political parties.

In the years ahead, political reformers, primarily city people, pushed 
for democracy. Mswati III succeeded his father in 1986, and in 2005, 
after much give and take, signed a new constitution. But it was a 
peculiar document, guaranteeing individual liberties with one hand and 
preserving the absolute monarchy with the other. The king would continue 
to appoint the prime minister and members of the governing cabinet and 
the judiciary.

Under this arrangement, it was hard for an outsider to tell where the 
monarchy ended and the government began. But most Swazis see things 
entirely otherwise. As a local saying goes, “A king is a mouth that does 
not lie.” The government is bad, people tend to conclude, but the king 
is good. “Others in authority abuse their power, not the king,” 
explained Ncoyi Mkhonta, the acting chief of the village Mahlangatsha.

Corruption is bleeding the treasury, but His Majesty’s exalted status 
has complicated the work of law enforcement. The finance minister has 
publicly estimated that $5 million — and maybe as much as $8 million — 
is siphoned off each month. Various anti-graft bureaus have failed to 
exact justice.

The latest corruption-fighting commission is headed by H. M. Mtegha, a 
retired judge from Malawi. He is not optimistic: “If we go after someone 
high up and he says the king told me to do this, what can I do? To be 
satisfied, I’d have to ask the king himself, and this cannot be done. 
The king is immune.”

Of course, being king is not without its own difficulties. In 2001, 
faced with the relentlessness of the AIDS pandemic, Mswati III invoked 
an ancient chastity rite, asking Swazi maidens to refrain from sex for 
five years. He then violated his own rule by selecting a 17-year-old as 
his ninth wife. To show the extent of his regret, he paid the customary 
fine of one cow.

In 2003, an 18-year-old caught the king’s eye, and some of the royal 
aides fetched the young woman from her school. The teenager’s mother was 
unwilling to part with her daughter in this manner and had the audacity 
to sue the king in a Swazi court. This dispute ended only when the girl 
convinced her mother that she was happy to become the king’s next bride.

With the ways of the royal family so often misunderstood, the king 
agreed to cooperate with an American film maker on a documentary, 
perhaps presuming a flattering portrayal. Instead, the movie, “Without 
the King,” directed by Michael Skolnik and released last year, 
juxtaposed the gilded furnishings of a royal palace with scenes of the 
Swazi destitute eating animal intestines scavenged from a dump site.

In the film, Mswati III acknowledged the poor: “It’s always very sad 
when you see a lot of them sick about their lives, how difficult it is, 
how difficult they are coping, looking after their families and so on. 
And then you see sometimes that you wish to help them but the funds are 
always not enough.”

One of Swaziland’s greatest traditions is the annual Reed Dance when 
colorfully adorned, bare-breasted young women — all proclaiming purity 
as virgins — parade before the royal family and others. This year’s 
ceremony — last Monday, in fact — took place in the Ludzidzini Arena 
with the Mdzima Mountains as a jagged backdrop and a record 60,000 
dancers performing on the grassy field.

It seemed an inspiring display of Swazi pride, and yet there have been 
critics of the king who consider such festivities a manipulation of 
culture for political gain. “As people challenge the monarchy, demands 
increase to show that the king remains popular,” said Musa Hlophe, head 
of a coalition of civic groups. “Thousands of girls are transported by 
the government to the Reed Dance as if it were a referendum on the 
system itself.”

In recent years, the ritual has acquired additional excitement, for 
Mswati III sometimes selects his next queen from the throng of virgins.

Cinsile Maseko, a 13-year-old from a village 50 miles away, did not 
suppose the choice would be her, but she fantasized anyway about a 
marital transformation from poverty to plenty, becoming a queen dressed 
in stylish clothes and traveling the kingdom in a fancy automobile.

She relished the idea for a few seconds and then added one more joyous 
thought. “You’d be with the king,” she said.

.

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