AFRICAN EYE NEWS SERVICE, Mbabane | Wednesday
SWAZILAND has returned to work after the kingdom’s most sacred annual holiday, the Umhlanga Reed Dance, with the news that absolute monarch King Mswati III would not be taking an eighth wife this year.
The reed dance, an annual fertility pageant at which the king is expected to pick a new bride, saw an estimated 20 000 bare-breasted maidens, thousands of tourists and African royalists converge at Mswati’s royal capital of Lobamba last week.
The climax saw Mswati III lead a horde of armed loin-clothed warriors and splendidly adorned maidens in the ‘giya’, a traditional courtship dance.
King Mswati III did not, however, pick a new bride as expected by fascinated tourists because, traditionalists said, he wed a seventh wife earlier this month. The 32-year-old king picked the new queen, Senteni Masango, as his seventh wife at last year’s dance.
Disgruntled subjects in eastern Swaziland boycotted the dance, however, in protest against a chieftaincy row that may see a controversial brother of the king evicting them from their ancestral land.
The boisterous crowds at the dance belied the brewing row in which Swaziland’s Dlamini Dynasty has become embroiled, and revelled in what is considered southern Africa’s most intact and vibrant indigenous traditional celebration.