Of course, when I say ‘the wife’ I mean ‘one of the wives’. The King is thought to have 13 wives, but nobody can be sure because this is information that the Swazi people are not allowed to have.
According to the Times Sunday (15 February 2009), LaDube spent a quiet birthday at the Esibayeni Lodge motel with family and friends. The newspaper doesn’t say whether the King was present.
As those of us who sat through the 40/40 celebrations last year know, King Mswati III is 40 years old. He has a daughter Princess Sikhanyiso who is older than this wife.
King Mswati married LaDube after she came in the top three of the Miss Teen Swaziland competition in 2004. By my reckoning that made her about 16 years old at the time. Since marriage she has given birth to two children for the king.
LaDube told the Times Sunday, ‘I have no problem with the fact that I didn’t get to enjoy most of my teenage years, but getting married has made me more mature and proud.’
Not all teenagers feel the same. In October 2008, the Sowetan newspaper reported that a 19-year-old woman fled from Mbabane to South Africa after King Mswati spotted her at a Reed Dance and wanted her as a bride.
The Times Sunday quoted LaDube saying, ‘I decided to just have a small thing with my family and friends because this one [birthday] is more meaningful. And just like all 21-year-olds, I feel good.’
I’m not quite sure which other 21-year-olds she meant. In Swaziland 70 percent of the population of one million people live in abject poverty, earning less than one US dollar a day; last year 600,000 needed some form of international food aid to keep from starving and roughly one in three adults in their twenties are HIV-positive. Not much to celebrate there.
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