It didn’t start with this queen

Certain indiscretions shouldn’t spread beyond the imposing walls of a palace. Not so in Swaziland, where one of King Mswati III’s wives has not been entirely loyal.

Ndumiso Mamba, the King’s childhood friend and Minister for Justice, faces a death penalty or exile if found guilty of engaging in marital infidelity with Queen Nonthando Dube, the 12th of the 14 wives of the ngwenyama (the lion.)

In a sting operation, Swazi police arrested Mamba at the Royal Villas — owned by King Mswati — where he tried to hide under the bed. Mamba later resigned “following certain allegations circulating in the country and internationally.”

Mamba, who signed the royal family’s business and investment deals, has since been held at Big Bend Prison under King Mswati’s orders, while Queen LaDube, a former Miss Teen Swaziland finalist, is under house arrest at her mother-in-law’s Ludzidzini Palace, awaiting the return of the Lion from Asia.

King Mswati’s mother, who shares the king’s powers, has since dispatched a delegation to Mamba’s village to lay charges of “trespassing into another man’s home”. Mamba, who grew up in the King’s family since his father was Swaziland’s ambassador in London, was “set up” by his political enemies, who exposed how, dressed in military fatigues, LaDube would sneak out when the monarch was away.

The queen, who is a year younger than Mswati’s first child, Princess Sikhayiso, would saunter through the gate to a waiting car that would take her 10 kilometres west of the palace. Funny (or not funny) thing is, the sentence of the “crime” will be meted out by the king’s mother. The queen will have to be banished from the kingdom if found guilty.

Swazis must ensure they don’t cause dishonour to the King, a rule that also applies to his wives. But King Mswati brought dishonour to himself when his aides abducted 18-year old Zena Mahlangu, who was detained at the king’s palace for “royal duties.” Shortly, the former Miss Swaziland, who had caught the king’s (roving) eye at a Reed Dance in 2002, became protestations.

The 42-year old Mswati was fined a cow, which he paid as per custom. Swazi Press is barred from reporting on any allegations of royal impropriety, and the sex scandal was broken by South African media. King Mswati was on a 10-day state visit to Taiwan at the time, and the local media was only allowed to report on the honorary degrees the king had been awarded there.

The scandal has induced a migraine of imperial proportions for Mswati, who has political problems to contend with. “I find very little time with my family most of the time. I normally work until 11pm… and this makes me very stressed because I’m being overworked.” he told the BBC in 2001.

The chutzpah by the 22-year old Queen LaDube is not the first. Rumours of infidelity among the king’s wives are “an open secret”. Take the cases of Queens LaHwala and LaMagwanza (Delisa Magwaza), who conspired to escape from the royal kraal in 2004.LaHwala, a mother of two, left via South Africa — where her family lives — for London.

Queen LaMagwanza, who broke protocol by attending parties without approval from the royal family, left after having an affair with a 23-year old Lizo Shabangu, a Swazi living in Soweto, South Africa. Their secret romance was exposed when LaMagwanza told Shabangu to take a hike, which he did, to the doorsteps of South Africa’s Sunday Times newspaper and spilled the beans.

“I spent a whole week and a half in her room,” Shabangu confessed to the paper in September 2003. King Mswati ordered a special security team to search for the two runaway wives who “deserted because they had been denied conjugal rights for up to six months”, one source close to the royal kraal told the Daily Sun at the time.

When found, the wives said the King had “taken interest in teenagers as brides”. They were referring to the King’s marriage that year to Queen LaDube, who was then a 16-year old student at Mater Dorolosa High School, and the source of his current embarrassment.

Other wives who have gone against the Swazi grain include first wife, Queen LaMbikiza (Sibonelo Mngomezulu) who defied royal tradition, which dictates that a queen should not hold a public job. The alumni of the University of South Africa is an advocate of the High Court, besides being an ardent fan of South Africa’s Moroka Swallows FC.

The mother of two has a framed jersey autographed by the club’s players. She has been said to refer to her son, Prince Lindani as “His Majesty”, even though a future King must be an only child. Queen LaMatsebula is a Psychology major, while Queen LaMotsa, a mother of three sons, has been the Goodwill Ambassador to the United Nations Development Programme since 1996.

King Mswati meets most of his future wives at the Umhlanga, popularly known as the annual Reed Dance. This traditional ceremony is essentially for Swaziland’s maidens to pay tribute to the Queen Mother by presenting reeds for building windbreak hedges around her residence.

The one-week ritual is never about the King, who only attends on the last day as a sign of respect for his mother. But he also uses it to pick his wives from the over 100,000 maidens in attendance. However, he doesn’t just pick them like ripe cherries. The Liphovela (or Official Mistress) (they become wives and queens after siring a child) is chosen for him in advance.

Tulujane Sikhonde (courtier) and Cethuka Dhlamini (the royal court poet) are present during the ceremony to see that the king selects the right liphovela. But not without sideshows.

In 1999, Sentegi Masango was chosen, but the 18-year old was later found to have been a high school dropout, an investigation by the Times of Swaziland revealed. The magazine editor Bheki Makhubu spent a night in jail for running the story. Sandra Dhlamini, on the other hand, was rejected because she was found to be of “bad behaviour”.

The king put up five new palaces for some of his wives at a cost of $4 million (Sh320 million) from public coffers, according to the Times of Swaziland on Sunday. Over $3 million (Sh210 million) was spent on furnishings. According to tradition, the wives can’t live in his late father’s residence.

The Swazi tax payers reportedly further coughed $45 million (Sh3.6 billion) on a down payment for a personal luxury jet in 2002. When House speaker Marwick Khumalo headed a special parliamentary committee, which recommended against its purchase, he was suspended.

The king also spent about $3 million (Sh243 million) for a house in London for an “educational attaché” whose main duty is supervising royal Swazi children studying in the UK, besides a further $1.5 million (Sh121.5 million) on luxury homes for his extended family of over 200 brothers and sisters, whom he has the task of taking care of, financially and otherwise.

The British-educated King Mswati reportedly spent 3.4 million Rand (Sh340 million) on a Maybach 62. There are only two Maybachs in Southern Africa. And the other is a demo at the DaimlerChrysler showroom in Pretoria. When his extravagance was criticised by the media, he banned the photography of his vehicles.

King Mswati is worth $100 million (Sh8.1 billion) according to Forbes magazine, excluding about $10 billion his father, King Sobhuza II, put in trust for the Swazi nation during his reign, and in which Mswati is the trustee. The King has been criticised for his extravagant lifestyle in a country of four million people, 80 per cent of them poor, landless peasants faced with one of the world’s highest HIV/Aids infections.

In 2000, he announced in a parliamentary debate that all HIV positive people should be “sterilised and branded.” The following year, he attempted to curb aids by invoking an ancient Swazi chastity rite that banned women under 50 from having sex. But he violated his own decree by marrying a 17-year old as his 13th wife.

King Mswati’s father, who banned political parties in 1973, had 70 wives and over 1,000 grandchildren who depend on the profits from the royal-owned Tibiyo TakaNgwane Company, of which the jailed Mamba was the director before he began directing other prized affairs for the King.