Umcwasho maidens
Swaziland
1895
Photographer: Unknown
Photo Source: National Archives/Swaziland Digital Archives
***
One day, Haroun Al-Raschid readA book wherein the poet said:--“Where are the kings, and where the restOf those who once the world possessed?They’re gone with all their pomp and showThey’re gone the way thou shalt go.”--(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)--
***
This epigraph could have more appropriately opened a post on Yahya Jammeh, the president of Gambia, who also doubles as the country’s high priest, mystic and shaman (he’s known to have cured AIDS and reversed HIV by sheer ecstatic trance). In anticipation of the upcoming presidential election in November, Jammeh said this week: “Only God can remove me” from power. Adding: “So if anybody thinks that the opposition are going to win the forthcoming elections (they are) making a day dream.”
Anyway, I wouldn't be talking today about Jammeh and his mental condition, which anthropologists and psychiatrists would put in the taxonomic category of “culture-bound syndromes,” those unexplained diseases that only strike people from a specific culture.
Well, talking of “culture-bound,” I could see a link here—however tenuous—between Jammeh and the “Ngwenyama” of Swaziland, Mswati III, who is my subject du jour. Despite their western education—Jammeh at the military School of the Americas in the US (this being another debate, notwithstanding); and Mswati III at the prestigious Sherborne School in England—both men seem hopelessly “bound” by their cultures, no matter how twisted certain elements of these cultures could be.
But the name of Khalif Hārūn al-Rashīd came to my mind, which by the way sent me googling Longfellow for the text of the poem in the epigraph, because for quite a long time the Ngwenyama, with his work-in-progress harem, reminded me so much of the character Khalif al-Rashid of the The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. Al- Rashīd, the Commander of the Faithful, had a large harem, in which reigned his cousin and first wife Zubaidah as the everlastingly indisputable favorite, at the Khalif's palace in Baghdad, “the city of peace.” Though owning a harem would be about the one and only one common characteristic Pornocrat of Swaziland could share with al- Rashīd… Oops! I take that back...This is another characteristic trait they'd also share: when you were introduced "into the Presence," you went belly down in the ancient manner of the Chinese kowtow, "kissing the ground between his hands." Our Pornocrat is surrounded by paid sycophants who, at each one his public appearances, holler his praise in siSwati language in the fashion of West-African griots who, at the very least, couched their acclaims into songs accompanied by the beat of the balafon and the stringed chords of the kora...
Some African men used to envy the Ngwenyama for his manly robustness—pardon the sexist tautology. Just imagine Mswati III, a man with seemingly unbreakable balls of brass, who could take his 12th bride and cavort with her within two weeks of marrying his 11th wife. And without apparently needing any Viagra pills!
What’s more, his “culture” cut this pornocrat an incredible length of slack. Every year, by the end of the month of August, 50 thousand or more virgins from the four corners of the pornocracy seize the pretext of cutting reeds to be used as windbreakers at the compound of the Indlovukazi (literally, She-Elephant or the Queen Mother) and converge on royal grounds. Unaccompanied. Well, not totally unaccompanied as there are the royal appointees called “Indvuna yetintfombi” or “maidens’ captain” and her unit of female assistants who are the loose escorts of the girls participating in the world’s largest gathering of bare-breasted virgins…
Most of the teens and young women who go to this event do so in the hope of being noticed by the Absolute Pornocrat-in-Chief and chosen as bride, thus escaping by a sleight of hand from rampant poverty. This jamboree lasts for 8 full days until the finale, the Reed Dance or “Umhlanga.” On that ultimate day, the Pornocrat would then prowl the royal grounds and pick one of the bare-breasted maidens as an umpteenth addition to his harem. No wonder the London Telegraph gave the Ngwenyama the erroneous moniker of “King of the Swingers” (of this error, later below)…
But just wait a minute, folks…and allow me just this short but important digression... You’d expect that the origin of this kind of huge festival—“Umhlanga”— advertised and trumpeted ad nauseum as a traditional cultural event, would reach as far back in time as just shortly after the early bipedal hominidis had left their sanctuary of the Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania. Bullshit! The Umhlanga “tradition,” it turns out, was made out of whole cloth in the 1940s and 1950s—and “institutionalized” by decree in the 1980s!
The photograph on the top of this post, taken in 1895, is from the Swaziland National Archives. Here is what the legend of the photo says:
“This photo was taken at Mbekelweni in 1895. The photo shows four unmarried maidens wearing umcwasho around their necks. After a number of years of wearing a large tassel young maidens were allowed to remove it in a dance before the Queen Mother or Indlovukazi and they were then able to get married. This ceremony was elaborated between the1940s and mid-50s into the ceremony of Umhlaga or Reed dance as performed today when maidens wear colourful umcwasho. This custom was institutionalised in the mid-1980s when the Prime Minister, Prince Bhekimpi, made it mandatory for all maidens to wear the umcwasho daily. The ruling did not survive his term in office.”
So, I've had my fill of this hawking of the tag "traditional culture" by "culture-bound" Neo-Mobutuists or post-"Authenticity" traditionalists who "imagine" tradition as they go along!
In any case, you have to give the Pornocrat his due: his own bare-breasted daughters also take part in the Umhalanga festival, as in the photo below, which shows the Ngwenyama’s firstborn—Princess Sikhanyiso Dlamini (dead center)—dancing and singing with other maidens at the Reed Dance of August 31, 2008.
Princess Sikhanyiso Dlamini
Lobamba Village near Mbabane (capital city), Swaziland
August 31, 2008
Photo: Jon Hrusa
At the 2004 Umhalanga event, the Pornocrat chose sixteen-year-old Nothando Dube, Miss Teen Swaziland finalist of the year, as his 12th wife (photo below)—and one of the “Inkhosikati” (Queens) of the realm.
Nothando Dube, at 16,
Photographed during the annual Reed Dance ceremony
At the Embangweni Royal Residence
August 2004
Well, this stupid image of perpetual bliss, horniness and “jouissance” associated with the Ngwenyama has to be scrapped. The man is a wife-beater; a kidnapper (a few years back, a teen who had disappeared walking from school was later found at the Pornocrat’s palace; and, despite strong objections from her family, the king’s aides coerced her parents to accept the fait accompli of the girl’s already-consummated so-called “consensual marriage” with the Ngwenyama); and libidinally, he is as limited as any other man (two queens have fled the palace over the past few years and another one—the Inkhosikati Nothando Dube in the photo above—cuckolded the pornocrat with his own close friend).
No amount of Viagra pills would help this pathetic man out of the predicament of having to meet the psychosexual and hormonal needs of the growing battalion of young women in his harem, no matter how far advanced or terminal is his "culture-bound" “hyperactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD).”
What’s more, he’s a dictator of the worst kind and a kleptocrat who steals international aid money to his impoverished nation for his royal bling…
I said that the moniker “King of the Swingers” the Telegraph gave the Ngwanyama is “erroneous,” in that “swinging” entails a give-and-take protocol, swinging, as it were, going both ways—the man’s way with his multiple sexual partners; and the woman should also have the option of having her own swinging partners, if the orgies are separate anyway, what with the tight schedule of pornocratic activities.
But the Pornocrat doesn’t see it in that light.
In July 2010, Queen Nothando Dube, was basking in the rosy fog of the stormy liaison she was having with the pornocrat’s buddy and justice minister Ndumiso Mamba. The two lovers felt invulnerable and had lowered their guard. Then on that fateful day, as the 12th Inkhosikati was bedding one of her subjects, in a suite of the luxury Royal Villas Hotel, in Ezulwini, a suburb of the capital city of Mbabane, state security agents suddenly barged into the suite with handguns drawn. And poor Mamba made the classic pathetic attempt at hiding under the bed!
Both adulterers were arrested on the scene of their crime. Mamba was promptly fired and given the death sentence. To this day, the former minister might still be awaiting the Grim Reaper on death row of the Big Ben Prison. In fact, no one knows for sure the whereabouts of Mamba. He was briefly released after the incident but was quickly rearrested and charged with embezzling public funds; while the Indlovukazi (the Queen Mother), who by tradition shares absolute power with her son, lodged a customary complaint of “trespassing into another man’s home” at Mamba’s village tribal council. Incidentally, I’d like to know what the Indlovukazi means by “another man’s home.” The two lovers were arrested in a hotel suite. Or maybe she means by that that Nothando Dube’s body is the “home” of her son…
Now, fast forward to July 15, 2011.
To the date on which the Johannesburg-based Mailand Guardian published the bombshell titled “Royal wife begs rescue from abuse,” after its reporter caught up this past week with Queen Nothando Dube who went to South Africa on medical visit occasioned by the accidental burns suffered by one of her three kids.
At 23, the once vibrant teen now looks like a ghost of her previous self. The poise she used to cut as the 12th Inkhosikati is all gone (see the private picture at the bottom of this post). Her “Cinderella dream” of living large at the Royal Palaces has been dashed to smithereens ever since the day of that unspeakable and capital crime of lèse-pornocrat. Her daily life has now turned into a ghoulish nightmare—from which her only possibility of awakening might lie with Jacob Zuma whose intervention Nothando Dube is now begging on both her knees. And for good reason: she’s a South African citizen as well, “through her father.”
She told the Mail and Guardian reporter:
“Every time I want to go somewhere the security guards become aggressive with me. It happens about once a week, when I try to go somewhere. They literally hit me, they kick and they punch me. I am not allowed to go anywhere or see anyone. I can't even see a doctor. If I am sick or anything, they have to come to me. My family is not allowed to speak to the king. I am also not allowed to see him. How am I not allowed to see the man that I married?”
Read here the full cautionary tale for all the Swazi Pornocrat’s teen groupies who flock to the royal palace every year at the Umhlanga festival—high and raving, their head swarming with Cinderella pipe dreams.
Recent photo of battered Nothando Dube
Disgraced Inkhosikati of the Pornocracy of Swaziland
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