For hours, the royal stadium has been a spectacle of song and dance, as thousands of young women and girls from across the Kingdom of Swaziland, dressed in beaded skirts and colorful sashes that expose their thighs and breasts, performed for the guests assembled.
It is the last Sunday in August, the penultimate day of Swaziland's week-longUmhlanga ceremony, or Reed Dance, an annual event in which girls from the age of five to their early twenties—known as maidens—gather at the Swazi royal residence in Lobamba in an expression of tradition, chastity, and independence.
Although the show begins long before Mswati's arrival, the crescendo is reserved for the polygamous 46-year-old monarch, who descends from his seat in the luxury box with a regiment of bare-chested men, all dressed in patterned skirts, beaded sashes, and leopard-skin loincloths.
Soon, the king and his entourage are jogging through the lines of teenage subjects, occasionally pausing for the balding, soft-around-the-edges monarch to bow. Eventually, after weaving through all the maidens—while keeping an eye out for would-be wives for the king—the group returns to a red carpet at the edge of the grandstand, where Mswati, wearing a diamond-studded watch and carrying a gold scepter, poses in the twilight.
"This land is for the king," the maidens shout in Siswati, the national language. "And people must not distribute it without his consent."
In Africa's last absolute monarchy—a Connecticut-size kingdom sandwiched between South Africa and Mozambique—where 60 percent of the land is effectively owned by the king, the song is no exaggeration. Under Swaziland's dual land tenure system, roughly 70 percent of its 1.2 million citizens live on plots that are held in trust by the king, who imposes his authority through a network of local chiefs with the power to evict their tenants without recourse.