Is it Good to be the King?

Fire of Liberty

I guess you can put Swaziland in the same corner as Zimbabwe. While 40% of the population is infected with HIV, the King is having a large ceremony known as "Reed Dance" where some 20,000 semi-nude virgins parade in front of the King hoping to be picked as the 15 wife of King Mswati. Now most people might find this as just another National Geographic story but just read what the Guardian had to write about this Swaziland tradition:

As absolute monarch of a country where women have few legal rights, he cannot be refused. In 2002 when the king chose a teenager for a wife, his emissaries abducted her from her school. The girl's mother began a lawsuit alleging kidnap, but royal representatives argued successfully in court that the king by tradition has the right to select wives at his pleasure.

Women are minors under the law, and cannot have bank accounts or sign binding legal contracts, so the opportunity to become a royal wife with one's own palace and BMW is attractive to many.

The country is stuck in poverty with 66% of the 1.1 million population living on less than a dollar a day. A third are dependent on international food aid.

Last week, unaccountably, the king decreed the end of the umchwasho, a ban on sex with teenage girls. He initiated the rule in 2001, stating that all teenage girls had to wear large woollen tassels around their heads to signify their virginity.

The tassels were said by some girls to protect them from unwanted sexual advances. But the king was among those who broke the ban and had to pay cows as penalties for having sex with teenage girls.

I guess the survival of you population from poverty and HIV is the least of your worries when you have to select a poor and vulnerable child who needs to be in school rather than the King's plaything. And we wonder why Africa is in such despair, could it be the quality of their leadership.