Oh boy. For your amusement....
 | ||||
| It Reads: "Royal Swaziland Sugar Corporation's Wandile Ngcamane and Taylor Cruz were a marvel to watch with their dance moves on the lawn in front of the stage. |
Thursday, May 15, 2014
"A Little Party Never Hurt Nobody"
Made the paper, yet again. If I can recall correctly, this makes the 5th time. This photo was in the country's national newspaper. It was taken during
the Simunye Fun Fair which is a huge music festival hosted right here in
my community. Amazing artists such as Mi Casa and Freshly Ground were present.
Oh boy. For your amusement....
Oh boy. For your amusement....
Tuesday, May 6, 2014
Africa Game of Thrones
This article was originally published in the Atlantic Magazine by
Imagine a mountainous kingdom at the edge of a lush, tropical continent, where one house has clung to power for hundreds of years. The aged king passed away after ruling for more than six decades in one of history's longest reigns. He fathered more than 200 children but left no heir, unleashing an epic struggle between the queen regent and a handful of challengers in the royal court. Eventually, a 14-year-old boy, the product of one of the king’s hundreds of illegitimate affairs, was chosen as successor, and his mother was wedded to the dead leader’s corpse to legitimize the plot. Selected as a puppet, the new king quickly outgrew his courtiers and became notoriously cruel and corrupt.
Today, the new king rules from a castle and employs a royal guard to protect his 15 wives. He often picks a new wife in a national festival each summer where his servants round up tens of thousands of the most beautiful young virgins from all across the land. There, they dance shirtless, and the king examines each one, choosing his next bride.
This is a feudal society where the majority of the population are poor farmers, tilling land supervised by the royal palace. Through his relationships with foreigners, the king earns plenty of coin, but hardly any of it trickles down to the poor. Although surrounded by spectacular and exotic plants and animals, the king's subjects suffer from a lack of basic goods and modern medicine. More than one in four adults is afflicted with an incurable, often-fatal disease.
His Majesty has no rivals. Under his banner of a golden lion, he dictates the future of his people after chatting with his small council. Political parties are illegal, and any defiance or criticism of the royal family is outlawed. Even insulting the king’s name is liable to be punished by imprisonment. The king controls all feudal lands and local barons, along with the court system, press, police, and army. Any who choose not to bow their heads to his decree are rewarded with a stay in the royal dungeons, where a pair of leg irons, or worse—an ancient and excruciating form of foot torture—is the punishment of choice.
Considered the father of his people, the king’s legitimacy rests on ritual and superstition. To protect himself against demons, the king imbibes charms and potions. His royal court and ministers routinely grovel on the ground. If His Majesty deigns fit to visit a subject’s home, the chair in which he sits must be destroyed—or else, it is feared, an evil sorcerer might attack him.
We who write this are not on the production team of HBO’s Game of Thrones. We work in a human-rights organization in 2014. Yet we could be describing King’s Landing. Regrettably, however, this is no tale from Westeros: It is an accurate description of Africa’s last absolute monarchy, a tiny country near the continent’s southeastern coast called Swaziland.
King Mswati III, the real-life ruler of Swaziland, has held total dominion over this realm since 1986. Of course, Mswati’s lifestyle also includes the trappings of modernity: Maybach limousines, a DC-9 jet aircraft, and foreign bank accounts worth billions of dollars. The habitual treatment of his critics might be medieval, but his corruption parallels that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and Equatorial Guinea strongman Teodoro Obiang.
Mswati does, in fact, select his new wives from tens of thousands of half-naked women crammed into a stadium. Elsewhere, 80 percent of the Swazi population makes less than two dollars per day. HIV, the incurable illness mentioned earlier, afflicts 31 percent of the country’s adults, the highest national rate on Earth. The average Swazi can only expect to live about 50 years.
Amid this bleakness, Swaziland is also home to some larger-than-life heroes whose bravery rivals that of any character found in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. This week, for instance, the human-rights lawyer Thulani Maseko and journalist Bheki Makhubu sat in prison, on trial for the crime of questioning the independence of Swaziland’s judicial system.
Last year, King Mswati violated a constitutional ban on foreign-born judges and personally installed Michael Ramodibedi of Lesotho, a pliable Mswati loyalist, as Swaziland’s chief justice. This February, Maseko and Makhubu wrote defiant articles in The Nation—the country’s only independent media outlet—excoriating Ramodibedi for imprisoning Bhantshana Gwebu, the national motor-vehicle inspector. Gwebu was just doing his job, but a car he impounded happened to be owned by one of Ramodibedi’s colleagues. Gwebu has been released on bail, pending his trial.
In Swaziland, following the law instead of a royal judge’s decree lands you in jail. So, in retaliation for their investigative journalism on Gwebu’s arrest, Mswati’s police raided Maseko and Makhubu’s homes, violently seized them, and brought them to “justice.” In true Westerosi style, they were arraigned not in a court of law with due process, but in the chief justice’s private chambers. As you read this, Maseko and Makhubu are in leg irons, lumped in dungeons with common criminals. The day before his arrest last month, Maseko accepted an invitation to speak in Norway at the Oslo Freedom Forum, which is organized by the Human Rights Foundation, about the state of human rights in his country. He’s scheduled to speak on May 13—if he’s released from jail in time.
“There is peace” in Swaziland, the head of the country’s only trade union once remarked. “But it’s not real peace if every time there is dissent, you have to suppress it. It’s like sitting on top of a boiling pot.
Imagine a mountainous kingdom at the edge of a lush, tropical continent, where one house has clung to power for hundreds of years. The aged king passed away after ruling for more than six decades in one of history's longest reigns. He fathered more than 200 children but left no heir, unleashing an epic struggle between the queen regent and a handful of challengers in the royal court. Eventually, a 14-year-old boy, the product of one of the king’s hundreds of illegitimate affairs, was chosen as successor, and his mother was wedded to the dead leader’s corpse to legitimize the plot. Selected as a puppet, the new king quickly outgrew his courtiers and became notoriously cruel and corrupt.
Today, the new king rules from a castle and employs a royal guard to protect his 15 wives. He often picks a new wife in a national festival each summer where his servants round up tens of thousands of the most beautiful young virgins from all across the land. There, they dance shirtless, and the king examines each one, choosing his next bride.
This is a feudal society where the majority of the population are poor farmers, tilling land supervised by the royal palace. Through his relationships with foreigners, the king earns plenty of coin, but hardly any of it trickles down to the poor. Although surrounded by spectacular and exotic plants and animals, the king's subjects suffer from a lack of basic goods and modern medicine. More than one in four adults is afflicted with an incurable, often-fatal disease.
His Majesty has no rivals. Under his banner of a golden lion, he dictates the future of his people after chatting with his small council. Political parties are illegal, and any defiance or criticism of the royal family is outlawed. Even insulting the king’s name is liable to be punished by imprisonment. The king controls all feudal lands and local barons, along with the court system, press, police, and army. Any who choose not to bow their heads to his decree are rewarded with a stay in the royal dungeons, where a pair of leg irons, or worse—an ancient and excruciating form of foot torture—is the punishment of choice.
Considered the father of his people, the king’s legitimacy rests on ritual and superstition. To protect himself against demons, the king imbibes charms and potions. His royal court and ministers routinely grovel on the ground. If His Majesty deigns fit to visit a subject’s home, the chair in which he sits must be destroyed—or else, it is feared, an evil sorcerer might attack him.
We who write this are not on the production team of HBO’s Game of Thrones. We work in a human-rights organization in 2014. Yet we could be describing King’s Landing. Regrettably, however, this is no tale from Westeros: It is an accurate description of Africa’s last absolute monarchy, a tiny country near the continent’s southeastern coast called Swaziland.
King Mswati III, the real-life ruler of Swaziland, has held total dominion over this realm since 1986. Of course, Mswati’s lifestyle also includes the trappings of modernity: Maybach limousines, a DC-9 jet aircraft, and foreign bank accounts worth billions of dollars. The habitual treatment of his critics might be medieval, but his corruption parallels that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and Equatorial Guinea strongman Teodoro Obiang.
Mswati does, in fact, select his new wives from tens of thousands of half-naked women crammed into a stadium. Elsewhere, 80 percent of the Swazi population makes less than two dollars per day. HIV, the incurable illness mentioned earlier, afflicts 31 percent of the country’s adults, the highest national rate on Earth. The average Swazi can only expect to live about 50 years.
Amid this bleakness, Swaziland is also home to some larger-than-life heroes whose bravery rivals that of any character found in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones. This week, for instance, the human-rights lawyer Thulani Maseko and journalist Bheki Makhubu sat in prison, on trial for the crime of questioning the independence of Swaziland’s judicial system.
Last year, King Mswati violated a constitutional ban on foreign-born judges and personally installed Michael Ramodibedi of Lesotho, a pliable Mswati loyalist, as Swaziland’s chief justice. This February, Maseko and Makhubu wrote defiant articles in The Nation—the country’s only independent media outlet—excoriating Ramodibedi for imprisoning Bhantshana Gwebu, the national motor-vehicle inspector. Gwebu was just doing his job, but a car he impounded happened to be owned by one of Ramodibedi’s colleagues. Gwebu has been released on bail, pending his trial.
In Swaziland, following the law instead of a royal judge’s decree lands you in jail. So, in retaliation for their investigative journalism on Gwebu’s arrest, Mswati’s police raided Maseko and Makhubu’s homes, violently seized them, and brought them to “justice.” In true Westerosi style, they were arraigned not in a court of law with due process, but in the chief justice’s private chambers. As you read this, Maseko and Makhubu are in leg irons, lumped in dungeons with common criminals. The day before his arrest last month, Maseko accepted an invitation to speak in Norway at the Oslo Freedom Forum, which is organized by the Human Rights Foundation, about the state of human rights in his country. He’s scheduled to speak on May 13—if he’s released from jail in time.
“There is peace” in Swaziland, the head of the country’s only trade union once remarked. “But it’s not real peace if every time there is dissent, you have to suppress it. It’s like sitting on top of a boiling pot.
Fish Out of Water
The end of term one also meant the
end of swimming season. The past few months I’ve been coaching the high school
swim team. The funny part is I’m not a swimmer at all. I took swim lessons as a
kid and spent my summers in the swimming pool, but I’ve never practiced the
formal strokes. So how did I end up doing this?
It all started when I took my life skill students to learn water safety. I am
good friends with the local swim coach here and I’ve helped him with several
swimming activities since he also coaches the kids I teach at the private
school. Thus I asked the coach to come one afternoon and teach my high school
students. Once he saw how good they were, he decided to continue working with
not only that class, but the entire school—that’s when the swim team began.
Due to the
coaches schedule, he couldn’t be there everyday, that’s where came in as coach.
I worked with the students every Tuesday- Thursday. Friday is when the coach
came to watch them. I knew what the proper technique looked like, so standing
on the outside of the pool I would tell them, “Chin up, kick from the waist,
toes together, and thumbs out!” I also run drills with them, taught them the
correct way to dive, and how to swim without holding their noses. After two months of training, we took the
kids to a gala (swim meet) where they competed against 4 other schools. They
raced in back stroke, breast stroke, butterfly, and freestyle. Every single
event they did, they won first place!
I’ve
tried different projects here, you know, ones that we’re my ides, but haven’t been
as successful as this. This time around, I wasn’t pushing swimming on the kids,
they were the ones who wanted it and took ownership. Four days a week the kids
were in the pool. I didn’t have to drag them there. I even saw them practice
alone on the weekends. These kids were excited to do something other than play
soccer or netball.
Like I
said, there was some real talent in these kids. There were a few who looked like torpedoes in
the water. We even dubbed the nickname “Superman” to one of the boys because of
how fast he was. I wish I had more time
here and had more help to let these kids explore their options available. As
you’ve read in other blogs of mine, I started teaching dance lessons, the kids
loved it—they were learning something more than just the traditional African dances.
African kids are more than just soccer and learning home economics. Just like
the youth around the world, they want to be exposed to gold, music producing,
to technology, to art, etc. We can not limit their creativity or their
interests, if we do, than we limit their future.
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