Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi — on a road trip through southern Africa — pitched his tent in the Swazi royal kraal Friday, refusing to sleep in a hotel.
King Mswati III, an absolute monarch who rules over a million people in his mountain kingdom between South Africa and Mozambique, gave Gadaffi the title ”Grand Councillor to the late King Sobhuza II”, Mswati’s father, for his contributions to Africa and Swaziland, the Swaziland Broadcasting and Information Services reported.
Gadaffi is travelling in a 90-vehicle motorcade with heavily armed bodyguards — 400, according to South African reports — from South Africa through Swaziland and Mozambique to Malawi.
It is rumoured that the motorcade will drive all the way through Africa to Libya.
”The president is a leading statesman who has contributed a lot in the development of the African continent. No wonder the king found it fitting to confer such an award to this great leader,” Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini said on the radio.
Dlamini said that Gadaffi had been one of Swaziland’s biggest supporters since the reign of Sobhuza II, who died in 1982.
Gadaffi laid a wreath for Sobhuza II at Lozitha palace, just outside Mbabane, where he held talks with King Mswati there.
Swazi supporters of Gadaffi spent the better part of Thursday chanting his name, holding up posters and waving. They went into a frenzy when he crossed the border into the tiny kingdom.
Some people at the border thought South Africa was invading, one correspondent reported.
Gadaffi attended a July 8-10 African summit in Durban, South Africa, where his bodyguards had several run-ins with South African security men, and where the government — playing down press reports — issued a statement to say his bodyguards had only 28 submachine guns and 43 pistols, and that most of them were handed over to the South Africans during the summit. – Sapa-AFP