Obscure Kingdoms: Tonga. Oman. Nigeria. Swaziland. Java. by Fox Edward

Author:Fox, Edward [Fox, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Diamond Tent
Published: 2015-02-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Invisible Kingdom – Swaziland

Swollen with confidence as a result of my success with the Nigerian rulers, I then set about investigating an African monarchy – a kingdom where the King was the ruler of the state. There was one functioning monarchy left in sub-Saharan Africa, Swaziland. It had a population about the same as Tonga’s, so I assumed that it would be as easy to see the King, Mswati III, as it had been to see Taufa’ahau Tupou IV. I consulted some South African academics that I knew who had lived in Swaziland for many years. The time was just after Christmas.

‘It’s a pity you’re not there now,’ they said. It was the time of the incwala, the annual ritual of Swazi kingship. The incwala was a kind of drama in which the King, the Ngwenyama, was the central character. Now the King was in ritual seclusion, being treated by his doctors with magical ointments. He would soon emerge in the role of a supernatural hero, to perform a dance in which he would command the forces of nature to obey him and to give him power for the coming year. The unity of the nation and the fruitfulness of the land depended on it. The slightest error in the performance of the ritual could have grave consequences.

The incwala begins with the waxing of the first moon after the winter solstice. Astronomical conditions were such that I had only a few days to arrange my trip. I might just get there in time. I knew that if I didn’t see the King at the incwala, I would probably never see him at all.

The King of Swaziland, Mswati III, had been King for nearly five years, but he was only twenty-two, and he did not have the mystical charisma and the practical experience of kingship the Swazis call ‘shadow’. He was surrounded by an extensive and invisible web of advisers and minders who made sure their captive King wasn’t allowed to put a foot wrong. The King was young, and there was popular clamour for reform, so, politically, the monarchy was vulnerable: it was existing only to defend itself. This was only one of the facts that in my Nigerian-induced folie de grandeur I had not adequately considered. I sent off a letter to the palace and, without waiting for a reply, made preparations to go.

I arrived in Johannesburg on New Year’s Day and boarded an early-morning bus to Swaziland that slowly chugged and wheezed through the plains of the eastern Transvaal. It was a ‘black bus’: it stopped mainly in the ramshackle black townships that coexisted beside the neat white suburbs. Most of my fellow passengers were Swazis on their way home from their jobs in South Africa.

The towns were depressingly familiar close cousins of the featureless and charmless small towns of middle America, but set in a vast and beautiful landscape. The earth was terracotta red, and under the broad, blazing sky seemed to vibrate with the power of life, thrusting up proud, towering trees and sleek fields of grain.

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