Is the Swazi Royal Family about to be at the centre of another sex scandal?
This time it involves sex with a child.
Newspapers in Swaziland have been recounting the sordid tale of Prince Logcogco and a dispute he is having with a teenage girl about custody of their child.
I won’t go into the detail of that, but many readers might think a man who is nearly 60 years old, shouldn’t be fathering a child with a teenager. I’ll leave you to decide on the merit of that one.
What the media have missed is the age of the mother. She is described as a ‘teenager’ but her exact age (and her name) is not revealed.
But one report says the child in dispute is four years old. You do the arithmetic. If the mother is 19, that means she had the baby when she was 15 and could have conceived when she was 14. If the mother is younger than 19, then Prince Logcogco had sex with her at an even younger age.
In Swaziland the age of consent is 16. The Girls’ and Women’s Protection Act of 1920 makes it clear, ‘Every male person who has unlawful carnal connection with a girl under the age of sixteen years or who commits with a girl under that age immoral or indecent acts or who solicits or entices a girl under such age to the commission of such acts shall be guilty of an offence’.
The penalty is prison not exceeding six years ‘with or without whipping not exceeding twenty-four lashes and with or without a fine not exceeding one thousand emalangeni in addition to such imprisonment and lashes’.
So we need to be told. Did Prince Logcogco have sex (‘carnal knowledge’) with the mother of his child when she was under the age of 16? And if he did when will the police move in and make an arrest?
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