GROWING UP IN SWAZILAND'S POVERTY

Engineered consent in Swaziland

Kenworthy News Media, 11 September 2015 

SOURCE

Imagine you’ve started your first job after a year’s unemployment of endless number of job applications, after finishing your engineering degree. You are excited, not least because you have had no source of income while unemployed and because several of your friends speak of their newly found jobs on Facebook and LinkedIn, writes Kenworthy News Media.

What you are met with is an unsigned contract of employment with no job title and no mention of wage rate or working hours. You receive no introduction to your new work place. You have to pay for your own tools, and are met with racism, poor working conditions with multiple accidents and ill-treatment once. Your wages turn out to be US$10 a day, the same as an unskilled domestic worker.

This is what 27-year-old Mkhonzeni Dlamini experienced while working as an assistant electrician for a sawmill company in the small absolute monarchy of Swaziland, as he outlines in his second book “Delayed Dreams”.

Desperate for work
Dlamini had studied electrical engineering at the University of Swaziland. He had grown up in a mud hut in the rural areas of Swaziland, with barely enough money to eat or to attend school, and he and his family had to make great sacrifices for him to attend and complete his engineering degree.

With his degree and job opening, he was now looking forward to being able to support himself and his family. Both his mother and father are ageing and unemployed and caring for one’s parents is a burden successful family members have to bear in Swaziland, says Dlamini.

But after a month he had nevertheless handed in his resignation. He was fed up with the racist remarks from management, threats of dismissal for trivial matters and fellow workers being kicked, slapped and beaten by their seniors.

His fellow workers stayed on, too desperate for work in a country with over 40 percent unemployment and where over two thirds of the population survives on under a dollar a day. “They can be paid peanuts and ill-treated but they won’t complain since life is too miserable for most of us”, writes Dlamini. 

‘We change but remain unchanged’
“I made changes in life. I saw myself better off than others. But I saw no change and I remained like everybody. Life is a merry-go round. We change but remain unchanged”, Dlamini continues.

A short but highly relevant comment on living in an absolute monarchy, where your opportunities and place in society are almost fully dependent on your connections and willingness to comply with the decrees of Swaziland’s absolute monarch, Mswati III.

“In Swaziland you can rarely find a company or government parastatal whose board of directors does not include a prince, princess, chief or the king’s business associate. We live in an absolute monarchy where the king is above the law”, as Dlamini puts it.

Don’t accept defeat
“My stick-and-mud house was no more safe, termites had destroyed most of the supporting poles on the wall and roof. To avoid the iron sheet from being blown away by the wind I had placed some old car tyres and bricks on the roof”, Dlamini says of his present predicament in what is a fitting metaphor of the state of Mswati’s kingdom.

“Most of us in Swaziland are subjected to oppression and others have become accustomed to oppression and no longer express any resistance to it. They have accepted defeat”, he continues.

Not Mkhonzeni Dlamini, however. After resigning, he wrote a letter of resignation that eventually led to several changes in the company he had worked for, including the introduction of management skill courses, his racist and violent superior being reprimanded, and the arrival of his final pay check that had been missing.

And he wrote a book about his experiences where the last sentence reads “if any man were to believe in himself and unite with like-minded people, nothing can stand in his way”.

The future
For his part, Mkhonzeni Dlamini wants to take a postgraduate degree in Engineering, depending on whether he can get a scholarship, after which he wants to work as a consultant engineer and part-time lecturer, he tells me. He also plans to write several more books in his series about life in Swaziland.

As for the future of Swaziland, he is less optimistic. “The future of Swaziland is gloomy, everyday things are getting worse”, he says. Dissenting voices are therefore on the rise and there is subsequently a real possibility of talks between the democratic movement and the king.

“But in my opinion these democracy talks are merely a PR-strategy by the regime. The prerequisite for such an exercise would be to first unban political parties, release political prisoners, call for the return of exiles and allow freedom of speech and association”, says Dlamini.

Buy “Delayed dreams” at Amazon.

Read more about what it is like to grow up below the poverty line in Swaziland, but succeeding academically against all odds, in Mkhonzeni Dlamini’s first book, Phoenix mysteries – memoirs of a born oppressed.

THE VOICE OF THE SWAZI POOR

The voice of the poor and oppressed in Swaziland

31 March 2015 Kenworthy News Media

SOURCE

Are you tired of reading books, reports or articles by middle-aged, middle-class professors, authors, NGO-employees or journalists (like me) about how poverty-stricken Africans feel about or should react to their poverty? Writes Peter Kenworthy of Kenworthy News Media.

Are you tired of seeing these Africans (who after all live in over 50 different countries and speak over 1000 languages) represented in a generalized way or in a way where we subconsciously (but falsely) come to believe the fact that they are silent, helpless victims that need our help and guidance?

Then you ought to read Mkhonzeni Dlamini’s “Phoenix mysteries – memoirs of a born oppressed”, about what it is like to grow up in abject poverty in Swaziland – and succeed against all odds.

Understanding the real Swazi, not the statistical one
Apart from giving a good general description of what it is like to grow up in a mud hut in the rural African countryside, with barely enough money to eat or to attend school, the book also describes the unique culture and political setting of Swaziland, Africa’s last absolute monarchy – a “truth that is stranger than fiction”, as Dlamini puts it.

Since literature from Swaziland is relatively scarce, especially literature that criticizes the government and challenges the status quo, and since those who do so are harassed by the police, Mkhonzeni Dlamini’s book is particularly interesting.

Also because even though there are many statistics, reports and articles about Swaziland, understanding Swaziland (or any other country for that matter) also means understanding the individual Swazi and his or her mental set-up.

Humble beginnings
Mkhonzeni grew up in stick-and-mud hut with cow dung-smeared floors in an impoverished village outside Nhlangano, a town in Southern Swaziland with a population of about 10,000. His mother was a house-maid, his father an alcoholic ex-miner who, as many other Swazi men, had worked in the South African mines.

His parents were too poor to be able to afford luxuries such as electricity or running water, let alone a washing machine. So Mkhonzeni had to cook, fetch bilharzia-infested drinking water from the local river, and wash his clothes by hand.

From time to time he and his family had to sell marijuana (that had accidentally germinated in their yard), walk to town to buy packets of biscuits and other snacks to sell in the village, and rear and sell piglets and pork to survive. Especially when the yield from their small maize field was poor, or when local thugs had stolen the honey from his bee-hives.

Education, education, education
Somehow, despite of these adverse conditions, Mkhonzeni managed to get himself a university degree, and the main argument Mkhonzeni Dlamini makes in his book is that education is a way of transcending both physical and intellectual poverty, and that it is therefore a precondition for both personal and political change.

Getting a proper education in Swaziland, especially when one belongs to the 70 percent of the population that survive on less than a dollar a day, is an uphill battle, however.

Mkhonzeni describes how he had to bend his right hand over his head and touch his left ear, to be admitted to primary school (which he failed to do the first two years), how he had to go to school on an empty stomach with no writing utensils, how corporal punishment was “rampant” in a school that had no running water and only eleven geography text books, and how he was expelled several times for owing school fees.

Indeed, most of his classmates dropped out of school due to lack of money. But Mkhonzeni rose to the challenge, studying hard, reading newspaper scraps before his father used them to roll cigarettes, writing articles for newspaper competitions, making toy cars out of wire, tins and pieces of wood, and playing with disposed electronic equipment as a creative precursor to his engineering studies later in life.

Tear-gassed at university
By way of his excellent grades, and the financial aid of private benefactors, he was able to enroll at the University of Swaziland and complete a bachelor’s degree in engineering, whilst avoiding most of the pitfalls and restrictions of Swazi traditionalist culture.

Mkhonzeni was also able to avoid the pitfalls of being a poor student, such as being able to afford accommodation and food, or making sure you do not fail an exam, as the extra cost of retaking it would mean the end of his academic career for many poor university students. This was done by adopting an “affordable lifestyle” that excluded alcohol, clubbing and smartphones, sacrificing other “luxuries” such as girlfriends and movies, and studying hard to make sure he passed his exams.

He was not able to avoid the police brutality that is a regular part of the life of any university student at the University of Swaziland who questions the status quo, however. Police used tear gas, rubber bullets, whips and batons to disperse the student demonstrations or attempts to deliver petitions to the Minister of Education, to complain about low student allowances or the postponement of exams that Mkhonzeni took part in.

Change yourself and change the system
It is forbidden to question the status quo in regime’s version of a Swazi traditionalist culture, that is built on corruption and nepotism and used to oppress and exploit the poor, as well as to promote child and women abuse.

And if you wanted to receive a scholarship, or after graduating, a position as a civil servant, you need to participate in the cultural events of the king, pay bribes, vote in the sham elections, and generally keep your head down, according to Mkhonzeni. “Everything is owned by the king and respect for him is paramount to living a smooth life. The whole land in rural areas is under the chiefs’ control on his behalf”.

In the book, he likens Swaziland, with its dictatorial leader, lack of freedom of expression, ideological coercion, and wholesale detention of dissidents, to Orwell’s Animal Farm. “I had once thought Orwell was an ordinary Swazi”, he says.

Understand us, help us
At the age of 26, Mkhonzeni Dlamini seems rather young to be writing his memoirs. But we don’t question a Wayne Rooney or a Lionel Messi when they write their memoirs about a more trivial matter, football, at a similar age.

Mkhonzeni has said that releasing the book now means that he is still relevant to the situations he is describing and that he believes that “releasing a memoir book at old age when you are happily married, employed and financially stable is an act of cowardice”.

He also told me that he wrote the book both as an inspiration to his fellow poor, young Swazis, but that he also had also written it for the rest of the world.

“I want the world to know the realities about life of ordinary citizens in Swazi countryside. I want the world to know that our government is like an uncaring and abusive stepmother, and I want the world to help us pressure our government to introduce democratic reforms, so we can all have access to equal opportunities in life”, he said.

And having read Mkhonzeni Dlamini’s book, is seems obvious that any true and meaningful opposition to the present Swazi regime, and any true democratization that is to follow, will have to be an educational and cultural revolution as well as a political one.

Buy the book from Amazon here.

Mkhonzeni Dlamini had been unemployed since graduating from University in October 2014. Swaziland currently has an unemployment figure of over 40 percent.