Swaziland’s annual Umhlanga ‘Reed Dance’ ceremony at which tens of thousands of maidens from all over the kingdom perform bare-breasted before King Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, is once again upon us.
This ceremony attracts massive attention inside Swaziland and most years it is also covered by some foreign news media. I have written at great length about Umhlanga in the past (click here to see the posts).
What interests me is that the foreign media often use the Umhlanga as an opportunity to report on Swaziland more generally.
This is exactly what the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) did when it visited Swaziland for the 2006 ceremony.
The report, which lasts a little over three minutes, manages to give a comprehensive account of what life is really like in Swaziland, contrasting the wealth of the monarchy with the poverty of ordinary Swazis.
The report begins by looking at the ceremony itself and then puts the significance of the event into a broader cultural context. It includes a rare face-to-face interview with King Mswati III. Look out for the point where King Mswati seems not to know how many wives he has.
The reporter Allan Little describes Swaziland as ‘a triumph of African tradition over an imported modernity’.
Viewers who have been raised on the deferential reporting of Swazi TV and Channel S may find this report disturbing.
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