Usurper of All He Surveys

MBABANE, Swaziland —  It’s good to be king.

Nearly half the people in this land of 1.1 million live in thatched huts without electricity or running water, and King Mswati III is in the market for a $50-million private jet.

Polygamous relationships are among the main drivers of Swaziland’s 33% HIV infection rate, but Mswati is still a monarch on the make. In the furtherance of the royal libido, the 34-year-old king’s minions recently abducted an 18-year-old student from her schoolyard. She soon will become the king’s 10th wife. As his people battle drought, disease and local customs that put a chokehold on the lives of women, Mswati has been swapping ideas with pop star Michael Jackson for an Africa-themed amusement park in Mbabane, the administrative capital.

Parliament told him that he couldn’t buy the plane, but the king still wants wings, and only he controls the royal purse.

“We have a saying here,” said Thulani Rudolf Maseko of the Lawyers for Human Rights in Mbabane. “ ‘The king is a mouth that does not lie.’ This means: Whatever the king says, even when he lies, is the truth. Whatever the king does, even if it’s wrong and unjust, is lawful.”

Now many seem to be saying: Enough is enough. International aid organizations are threatening to withdraw badly needed resources, and foreign governments say they will cut off diplomatic ties with this southern African nation if the monarchy doesn’t show more respect for the rule of law. Business groups here say the king’s shenanigans are scaring off foreign investment. Disgusted at his lack of regard for their rulings, the nation’s appellate court justices recently resigned en masse.

And if all that weren’t bad enough, labor unions are planning a two-day national strike beginning today to challenge the king. The action is expected to bring Swaziland to a standstill.

Portraits of the nation’s undisputed alpha male -- goateed, decked in feathers, animal skins and other furry regalia -- stare from travel brochures and hotel lobby walls across the land. Swaziland’s stubborn sultan seems a ready symbol for a patriarchal society drowning in its own testosterone.

“This is not just about the king or one abducted girl or her mother,” Doo Mary-Joyce Aphane, national coordinator of Swaziland’s Women and Law in Southern Africa think tank, said of the king’s recent marital conquest. “It’s about the rights of all mothers and the safety of girls in our society.”

Human rights lawyers and unionists representing virtually all trades in Swaziland have sought an audience with Mswati to discuss the nation’s woes in advance of the strike. But when you’re the ruler of Swaziland, there are other things to attend to than the ruination of the kingdom.

Observances for the annual Incwala -- or “first fruit eating” in the Siswati language -- have begun and, as dictated by custom, the king will be in seclusion until the end of the planting season in mid-January, government officials say. During this period, he cannot fulfill any government functions -- except, of course, for the moment it took to decree that the union protest was illegal.

Mario Masuku, president of the People’s United Democratic Movement, a banned political party, said the protest during the Incwala will be a “challenge to the monarchy itself.” After spending 10 months in detention on sedition charges, Masuku was acquitted and released in August. He has just returned from a European speaking tour, during which he urged governments to use divestiture and other means to force the king to share power.

As pressure grows to limit the king’s authority and to merge the nation’s vast body of oral laws with its not-so-vast written laws, Mswati has reacted by attempting to squelch debate. He has ignored Parliament, whose members are elected by the people but endorsed by the king. Mswati also has total say over who is in his Cabinet, and they all abide by his bidding. He has enforced a longtime ban on political parties, jailed his critics and co-opted a movement to draft a new national legal structure by stacking the constitutional commission with a number of his 200 princely brothers.

Swaziland, a mountainous, landlocked nation in the northeastern corner of South Africa, was ruled by the Voortrekkers -- Dutch pioneers -- and then by the British until 1968, when a constitutional monarchy was set up. Five years later, King Sobhuza II’s herald called a public meeting in the palace cattle corral, where he read the monarch’s repeal of the constitution. Sobhuza dissolved all parties, seized all government lands and gave himself authority to appoint or dismiss executive members of government.

Upon Sobhuza’s death in 1982, his son Mswati cut short his schooling in England and took the throne four years later, at 18.

“The British, ... the Spaniards, the Danes, in Lesotho -- they all have monarchies that don’t interfere with the day-to-day running of the government,” said labor leader Jan Sithole. “Their kings don’t rule, they only reign. In Swaziland, our king reigns and rules.”

If Swaziland’s constitutional problem were its only challenge, this would be a troubled land indeed. But the kingdom, which relies on maize for sustenance and sugarcane for trade, has more problems to worry about: It has been afflicted by drought for three straight years.

The grasslands of the Lowveld plains have given way to dusty patches of red earth. Crops are stunted this planting season: Maize stands only ankle-high when it should skirt the waist. Half the country’s farmers saw no yield this year, and production is down 60%. The World Food Program estimates that 250,000 people in Swaziland don’t have enough to eat.

Leaning on his walking stick, Simon Dingizwe Dlamini lined up last week for a sack of cornmeal. Like most in the Lowveld area, Dingizwe Dlamini’s family relies on its harvest for sustenance. But last year, everything he sowed died in the dirt. And this season, the ground is so brittle and unyielding that he didn’t waste his time planting.

What’s worse, Dingizwe Dlamini has more mouths to feed this year. AIDS recently killed his daughter, leaving him to care for her three children. He said he decided to sacrifice the education of his 10 other children so that he can afford semester fees for his grandchildren.

Waves of HIV carriers -- women mostly, mothers often -- are beginning to die of AIDS. The United Nations estimates that one-third of Swazi children will be orphaned by 2005, and many of them won’t have kindly grandparents to care for them.

With AIDS wreaking such havoc, Thobile Dlamini, who runs a women’s counseling and advocacy center in the city of Manzini, said the king’s abduction of the 18-year-old was worse than boorish, it was irresponsible. “The king is undermining all of our efforts,” she said. “We are really past an age where a man can have so many wives.”

All too often, said Dlamini, who is not related to Simon Dingizwe Dlamini, women are casualties of patriarchal Swazi traditions. A U.N. report released this year found that Swaziland’s annual “reed dance” that once was a celebration of female chastity has now become a meat market for men and a conduit for the AIDS epidemic. In fact, it was there that Mswati first laid eyes on his most recent bride.

The report also found that women’s low status in Swaziland often leaves them impoverished and vulnerable to exploitation “as they are forced to depend on men” and that polygamous marriages like the king’s contribute to the spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome, as does the Swazi practice of widow inheritance.

“The widow might be HIV-positive as her husband might have died of an AIDS-related illness,” according to the report. “This would mean that the brother inheriting the widow could be infected and in turn could infect his [other] wives.”

Even the Siswati language conspires against her sex, Dlamini said.

“The ... word we use for wife or woman literally means: ‘One who dies without speaking of what she endures.’ Women are supposed to be silent when they are abused,” she said.

Swaziland has only recently drafted laws against sexual offenses and has barely begun prosecuting rape cases. Women’s rights to own land, enter into contractual agreements and, generally, function independently of their fathers and husbands are sharply limited.

So when men die in Swaziland, their wives often are left without land, money or even skills to earn a living.

By Swazi standards, the late Mshiselwa Ndzinisa was something of a mogul. An advisor to several local chiefs, Ndzinisa owned three buses, many cattle and vast lands planted with maize and sugarcane. It takes an hour of driving up steep dirt roads to find his home on a mountain peak.

Ndzinisa’s 22 widows still live in his compound. There used to be 26, but in the last year, four have died. One had cancer, the wives say. The other three died of mysterious illnesses that caused lesions. Several other widows are ailing.

Nine of them, including several of the most senior, agreed to speak with a visitor about their lives, but they first led him away from the main house where Ndzinisa’s eldest son lives.

“We are not living a normal life. We have to struggle to have something to eat,” said Pauline Ndzinisa, 50. “No one is taking care of us since our husband died.”

The late patriarch’s brother and eldest son inherited all of the property, “and they are keeping all the wealth to themselves,” said Theresa Ndzinisa, also 50.

The women said they regret having entered into such a communal matrimony. For the oldest, it was a bit unexpected.

“I never knew he wanted so many women,” Theresa said. “He would take a wife, and I would think: OK, that’s the last one. And then he would take another. And I would think: That’s the last one. And then he’d take another and another.”

The widows have been allowed to stay in their respective homes, but they have no seed or tools to plow. Nor are they allowed to sell any of the cattle grazing the mountainside. They and their 78 children are hungry.

As for the potentate, most agree that Mswati will continue to stack his harem. Some say he’s looking for a wife who will give him a firstborn male heir. Others say he’s just a chip off the old block -- his father, who died at 83, had about 100 wives.