All This in 60 Minutes

by Lee, Nicholas

  The next morning, fully prepared for my National Geo award-winners, we went in search of traditionally dressed Swazis like we’d seen the night before, but all we could find were people in Western-style suits, jeans and T-shirts. We’d been duped. The men we saw in tribal clobber were probably on their way to a fancy dress party. And to top it off, Mbabane was a dump and it was pissing down rain.

  I knew these people deserved to be part of the 20th century as much as we did, but I needed exotic pictures, and nothing looked exotic. Before Swaziland gained independence in 1968, it had been a British protectorate, so we blamed the Poms for the modern clothes and soulless look of the capital. If it wasn’t for all the black faces, Mbabane, with its unattractive architecture and copious gum trees, could have been any small town in Australia. There was no hint of traditional architecture or culture.

  But it was hard to feel depressed with everyone wearing such gigantic smiles, just a shame they weren’t wearing animal skins and feathers as well. Everyone appeared happy, full of energy, confident and proud, completely different to the poor, downtrodden black people of Zimbabwe or South Africa. All those smiles were great to see, but we needed more. We needed those exotic images that unfortunately only existed inside the head of our executive producer. Shots similar to the ones he’d seen in Tarzan movies 50 years ago.

  We eventually found one such image. It was straight out of Tarzan. A traditional healer in a loincloth, with a bone through his nose. That’s more like it. We asked if we could film him going about his medical duties, and in his extremely articulate English he told us he’d be delighted. Well, at least it was a start. I filmed him from every conceivable angle. Tight shots of his big black eyes, pulling focus from the bone through his nose to his long-fingered hands administering eye of newt or wart hog gizzards or whatever he had in his bag of tricks. To keep the executive producer’s dream alive, I tried to keep the Pfizer skin creams and the antibiotics out of shot.

  So, there was 30 seconds done, now for the next fifteen minutes. Each 60 Minutes story is somewhere between thirteen and sixteen minutes, but to get those minutes takes four or five days of shooting. This coronation had better be bloody good, because our search for Swazi ‘culture’ had come to nothing. It just didn’t seem to exist. And it was still pissing down rain.

  We headed out to the hills to do a piece to camera on the death of the old king. The rain made everything dull and flat, the pictures were far from National Geo, and I was far from happy.

  That night we went to a disco to ease our sorrows and we found a culture of sorts. A room full of hypocritical white South Africans, drooling over the near-naked Swazi girls dancing in amongst many TV monitors showing soft porn. The men were teasing and fondling the obviously not happy local women. Back in South Africa these men treated the locals like shit, used them as slaves. But the Rand was so powerful and the Swazi economy needed the boost. I guess the Swazis had grown accustomed to these hypocrites.

  The rain, the lack of colour and the lack of Swazi identity had squashed my National Geo hopes but suddenly all that changed. The sun came out and led us to small villages with their distinctive ‘beehive huts’ made of mud and straw. We scored great shots of children bathing in rivers, and women, young and old, walking to or from markets with bundles the size of small cars on their heads. I’d seen the same thing throughout Africa, Asia, the Middle East and New Guinea, and it was always the same. Women loaded up to buggery, doing all the work. Often they’d have a bloke walking alongside carrying nothing but a cigarette. It was all great footage, though, and at last we were getting somewhere.

  The big day. Coronation time. The whole extravaganza was totally disorganised and the media were getting pissed off. Finally we were all herded like children into the royal kraal, a collection of huts covering many acres and fenced off to the world. This was where the royals lived. And there were shitloads of them.

  It’s said the old king, Sobhuza II, had more than 60 wives and 300 children. Talk about fecund, that’s a busy king. Nobody really knew the exact number of wives or children. It was a royal secret. But the bigger secret was how he managed, with all that action and distraction, to rule for 61 years.

  Inside the kraal I went looking for the best spot for my camera. I found out where all the official stuff was about to take place and claimed the premier spot by spreading out the legs of the tripod and surrounding it with the rest of the gear. I now had ownership of a good square metre. It was mine and I was not moving under any circumstances. How good am I? I hadn’t been doing this job for a zillion years for nothing. Being a seasoned campaigner made all the difference. The other cameramen and photographers could watch and weep.

  Twenty minutes later the weeping was all mine. Everyone was kicked out of the royal kraal, gear and all, and told by disorganised organisers to wait outside. We never found out why, but finally the word to go back in was given, unfortunately at the same time as it was given to the thousands of locals who had also been invited to the big day.

  There was one entrance and it was 2 metres wide. Not quite wide enough for thousands of people I would have thought, but there was no time to think. It was on, and it was dangerous. Desperately trying to protect the camera, being pushed and shoved (hopefully in the direction of the gate), I was having real trouble breathing, squeezed in by sweaty, half-naked Swazis pushing violently to get inside to catch a glimpse of their new king. It was like being caught in a washing machine. I kept my head down and pushed with them, then saw my lens hood fall to the ground. Luckily for me, my very important 85 filter was attached to the lens and not the hood. Without the filter, the king and all his countrymen would be blue, and I didn’t think blue shots of Africa existed in the executive producer’s head. It was too risky to try to get the lens hood back so I left it to be trampled by the mob.

  I looked across at Micky trying desperately to protect his Nagra tape recorder and his microphones. He, too, had his head down and was struggling to breath. I had no idea where George Negus or Andrew Haughton the producer were, but one of them had my tripod. If they were smart they’d be using it as a weapon to get themselves some breathing space.

  We made it inside, alive and bruised but also aghast that all the best spots had been taken by other media contingents and we were way up the back. How did they do that? These cameramen had obviously been working for two zillion years. To make matters worse, the biggest handicap for a cameraman is to be a short-arse. Like me. So now, not only was I a long way from the action, but I, and therefore my camera, couldn’t see a thing.

  The media were locked inside the ‘press pen’ and given strict instructions not to move outside, never. We were also told it was forbidden to take shots of the ‘sacred’ area over to our left. The sacred area consisted of a few modern buildings in amongst stacks of traditional beehive huts, which housed most of the royal wives. If either of those rules were broken, we would be dragged out in handcuffs. This time I believed them. As easy-going as this place appeared, you clearly didn’t mess with royalty.

  Somehow amongst the chaos the Swazis got themselves together and it was spectacular. There were already thousands of Swazis dressed in their traditional gear, all carrying shields and long sticks, blunt at both ends. They all appeared to be very proud of their sticks, which they swung from side to side in time with their slow melodious chanting. It was mesmerising. And still they kept coming, more shields and sticks squeezing into and totally filling every spare inch of the kraal. The size of the adoring crowd made it impossible for we sardines squeezed inside our media pen to have any chance of getting shots of the king or the event.

  Micky and I needed to think fast. The previous night we had dinner with George Dlamini, News Director of Swazi TV, so we called over an official and told him we were the designated documentary crew for the coronation, that we were friends of George from Swazi TV and the king would be very angry if he did not appear in any of the shots of his coronation due to our position at the back of the pen. After more
than half an hour involving many chiefs, it was decided it might be wise to release us from the pen and let us roam.

  And we did, much to the chagrin of the rest of the media pack.

  Did I say chagrin, I meant hatred, with death stares so frightening I kept my face glued to the camera, shit-scared to make eye contact with any of them. I wasn’t game to gloat. But I did have a deep sense of satisfaction having suddenly remembered I’d been doing this for three zillion years.

  Then the man himself appeared. Well, boy, really. Eighteen-year-old Prince Makhosetive, about to become King Mswati the Third, also known as The Lion, The Bull, The Guardian of the Sacred Shield, The Great Mountain and The Inexplicable.

  Dressed in what looked like a brown and white spotted lap-lap with an animal skin wrapped around his waist, and carrying shield and stick, the frightened-looking adolescent joined the thousands of chanting warriors. Very slowly the warriors lifted their right foot then the left, swaying backwards and forwards as one, at the same time lifting then lowering their shields and sticks, all totally in sync with each other. Most of the warriors had one or two feathers in their hair. The Inexplicable wore what looked like a crown of twenty bright red feathers backed up by three monster white feathers.

  It was truly National Geo stuff and I was getting the lot. They stamped their feet in unison, causing billows of dust and creating a soft hazy effect like an impressionist painting. I went for an impressive impressionist shot by running the camera along the ground to get closeups of the bare feet stomping in the dust. I kept rolling past hundreds of huge black feet all wearing some kind of ankle bracelet. And then smack-bang in the middle of my long tracking shot of those exotic feet, I came across a brand new pair of white running shoes kicking up more dirt than a four-wheel drive. It wasn’t the king, probably just some young guy who didn’t like to get his feet dirty. Somehow it made the shot.

  As I stood up for another wide shot, three or four warriors suddenly broke away from the mob, ran towards the king and slammed their shields to the ground in front of him, followed by another group, and another. And I was getting the lot. Fantastic wide-angle stuff, close-ups of beautiful black faces filled with adoration, all wanting to impress their king with their flamboyance. It was too good to be true, and I had the whole scene to myself. I ran in with the warriors and then back. I grabbed a shot from behind the king with the warriors heading straight at me. I got extreme close-ups of the king’s eyes. Then, with the camera on the ground, I got the shields slamming down inches from the lens. I was beaming. Oh my golly gosh, what to do next?

  The look on my face finally must have been too much for the penned-in, angry and envious media mob. With their faces oozing rage they broke free. There was no stopping them. They raced through the no-go sacred area. It was terrible to watch as they tripped over the assembled queens and assorted spectators. A few cameramen managed to emulate a couple of my shots, then suddenly it was all over. Bit of bad luck, I say, but I could truly feel the full effect of their anger as they struggled desperately to get something, anything, out of the day.

  If the media thought they were missing out, the assembled foreign dignitaries might as well have stayed at home. Except for sticks waving through the air, they wouldn’t have seen much at all. They were a good hundred metres from the action, though I did wonder if they were dignitaries or tokens. There was P.W. Botha from South Africa, an assortment of tribal leaders, Ronald Reagan’s daughter, and a string of black African presidents (many of them would later be assassinated, imprisoned for corruption, or living in exile with billions of dollars). And right there was our old friend the Duke of Kent, wearing exactly the same red velvet and gold bedecked outfit he’d worn in Belize. Hopefully he’d had it cleaned. He wouldn’t want to be a bit whoofy around the new king who was probably wearing the latest Chanel deodorant and aftershave along with his dead animal skin. After all, only one month ago the Boy King was at boarding school in England. No wonder the poor kid was looking bewildered. He was probably wondering if he’d have time to get his homework done before he had to kill a lion with his bare hands and choose a few virgins to marry, because it was decreed he had to do both. It was also decreed that he must be both potent and a virgin. Talk about inexplicable.

  The following day, inside a giant football stadium, all the ordinary citizens of Swaziland got to celebrate. The melee I was caught up in at the royal kraal was only for royalty and the aristocracy. I was amazed there was anyone left to participate. But there were tens of thousands of people waiting breathlessly to catch a glimpse of their new king. The most excited were the thousands of nubile topless women entering the stadium, the same ones I had seen coming over the hills, chanting and seductively swaying their breasts. All of them beautiful and all of them wanting to do more than catch a glimpse of their new king, they wanted to catch him. It was from this bevy of beauties he got to choose a bride or twelve. And, if they were lucky enough to be chosen, they’d live in the lap of luxury for the rest of their lives. Unless of course they were found to be unfaithful, upon which they would be banished from the royal kraal without their kids.

  The stadium celebration was, well, eclectic. Half-naked men and women alongside traditional and modern choirs, brass bands and marching girls. A bit of old, a bit of modern, a bit of bad taste. How’s that for democracy in an autocracy.

  This time the king arrived in an open jeep wearing a headdress almost as big as himself, made of huge magnificent black feathers, flowing halfway down his neck. I know this, because his neck was about all I could see during the nervous young royal’s speech. Somehow after the debacle of the day before, the organisers had managed to get organised. The media were all squeezed into a tiny enclosure miles away from the action, and to make sure there was no repeat of yesterday’s fence-jumping we were surrounded by cops.

  My shot of the king’s speech consisted of the royal neck, a super-abundance of microphones and the back of a cop. Every now and then if The Inexplicable cocked his head to the left, I could catch a glimpse of his left eye. Luckily it was only the speech, not riveting television anyway, and Tarzan wasn’t famous for speeches, so I figured I was safe from our executive producer. But I did need to get some colour and it wasn’t going to happen from where I was.

  It wasn’t three zillion years of experience that managed to get me out of that enclosure. For once, being a short-arse paid off. I deftly squeezed myself to the back of the enclosure while eager bodies were only too keen to fill up the area I moved from. The cops, way too busy trying to keep an eye on all the unhappy journalists and watch the king deliver his speech, didn’t notice me slip under the rope at the rear of our enclosure and move into the huge crowd. I pushed to the middle of the football ground, past all the men, then hid in amongst the thousands of nubile women. Well, not really hidden. I stood out like dog’s balls. A white man with an Arriflex camera on his shoulder in a sea of black women waving knives, shields, spears and breasts.

  The new king finished his speech and the crowd went wild. It was fantastic. I was surrounded by semi-naked women, some in skirts and others in such tiny bikini bottoms I wondered why they bothered. All of them brandishing long blade knives and swaying from side to side, a brave move considering they were all bare-breasted. They began chanting, then, still swaying, they moved from one end of the field to the other, all beautifully lit by the late afternoon sun. A sublime spectacle.

  The king came down to join them. The women as one moved slowly and seductively towards him, then gently away from him. They kept it up for at least half an hour, while the men ran past them to slam their shields on the ground inches from the royal feet. The whole time the king had a huge smile on his face, probably due to the knowledge that any, or many, of these bare breasted-beauties would very soon be his homework. Sure beats boarding school.

  He looked so innocent standing in front of his very happy and healthy subjects, all of them looking forward to a happy trouble-free future in their paradise with their beloved young kin
g.

  •

  Twenty years later I was back in Swaziland. The king had gained a dozen wives and a few dozen kilos but had lost a stack of hair along with the innocence, happiness, and hope of a trouble-free future for his subjects.

  The now older, wiser, larger king had some major ruling to do. Swaziland had the highest HIV prevalence in the world. One in four Swazis was HIV positive. Men, women and children, no one was spared.

  The first case was reported in 1986 and the virus had spread at an alarming rate. It particularly affected women in the fifteen to 49 age group, and 31 per cent of women had HIV compared to 20 per cent for men. In 2007, 10,000 people died from AIDS and life expectancy had dropped to 32.

  The king had declared AIDS a national disaster. He had made sure there was a good supply of condoms, but they were controversial and unpopular. Religious and traditional leaders had described condoms as un-Swazi, and the blame game was alive and well. No high-profile Swazi ever admitted to acquiring HIV until Chief Madelezi Masilela outed himself, saying he had acquired HIV through the practice of widow inheritance, where a man must marry his deceased brother’s wife. That evil woman.

  In 2001 the king reinstated a custom that banned all girls under the age of eighteen from sexual activity for five years and any man who had sex with a virgin had to pay a cow to the girl’s family. Nice try. But the king was soon accused of ignoring his own policy by getting engaged to a seventeen-year-old. At least the cow dowry wouldn’t have been a problem for him.

  We met the king in one of his many palaces. A large, modern building with acres of carpet, the classy royal type you see in every cinema complex and casino around the world. All the furniture, and there was plenty of it, was painted a shiny gold. Couches and chairs were covered in a bright yellow or red silk to give that regal look. The walls were covered in photos or really badly painted portraits of previous kings.