by Alec Russell
Post-colonial governments tended to skirt around the issue of how to adapt policy and law to indigenous beliefs. Most retained the colonial prohibition on witchcraft. Some went a step further and adopted an aggressively modernist approach. Mozambique went so far as to incarcerate thousands of traditional healers for 're-education'. But behind the sombre trappings of modern politics, the suits and ties and the convention rooms, at times of trouble many African leaders fall back on an older set of values.
In Mobutu's last years, a troupe of marabouts (Muslim mystics) from Benin and Senegal were among his most respected counsellors. After they told him in 1991 that he would never be ousted if he lived on water, he moved his household to a luxury steamer, the Camanyola, named after one of his early military victories, and steamed up and down the Congo directing- or rather misdirecting- the state. Even as the rebels closed on his capital in 1997, nyangas threw bones and he invoked the spirits of his ancestors before every significant decision. Much to the frustration of Western diplomats trying to broker a peaceful end to the crisis, Mobutu's seers had only to whisper and he changed his plans.
Mobutu's last act in Kinshasa was rooted in African spiritualism. Shortly before flying out for the last time, he cremated the body of his old friend, the former Rwandan president, Juvenal Habyarimana. The corpse had been carried out of Rwanda by the Hutus in their flight into exile in 1994, and Mobutu had embalmed it as a talisman against the new Rwandan government. By denying them the chance of burying it in Kigali, the Rwandan capital, he hoped to cast a shadow over their hopes of founding a new nation.
Even Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, who took power with a flurry of modernizing laws designed to root out what he regarded as 'retrograde' practices, has been known to resort to traditional forms of advice. He was said to be mortified when an influential medium told him in 1997 that his style of government had upset the ancestors' spirits, a terrible offence for a well-brought-up African, just as it was for Romans in classical times. Traditionalists muttered that it was no coincidence when lightning struck a tree in his grounds just two days after a powerful blast of wind nearly caused his plane to crash in neighbouring Mozambique. According to reports in the Zimbabwe media, he later met nine tribal chiefs with a reputation for spiritualism to ask their advice on how to stem the decline of his political fortunes - subsequent events suggested their counsel was to no avail, although they would no doubt argue he had left his consultation until far too late.
In my dispatch on the dramas at Sekororo I described the villagers' purpose as 'horrific'. I was chided by my American colleague for being too ready to apply my own values. In hindsight he had a point. When you come from a society that likes to 'know' rather than 'believe', it is easy to ridicule belief in witchcraft as primitive twaddle. To Europeans it is reminiscent of the Middle Ages, when wretched old women were ducked in ponds to see if they floated - if they did, they were witches and so were burned. But tradition and superstition are integral to the world view all over sub-Saharan Africa, where life is unpredictable and political structures unstable. Moreover, witchcraft in Africa does not have the connotations of Satanism that it had in Europe in the Middle Ages. In Africa suspected witches are one-off suspects guilty of a particular 'crime' or natural phenomenon. Once a witch has been expunged, a community can resume its old pace. That does not make the 'expunging' any the less shocking but it is important to under stand that witchcraft in remote areas is not seen as a manifestation of evil; it is part of the tapestry.
Many Africans who abhor the idea of ritual killings point out that established world religions have beliefs and rituals that would seem extraordinary to many an African tribesman. While the word 'witch-doctor', the standard Western translation for sangoma, is steeped in the idea of mumbo jumbo and black magic, the respectable mainstream of sangomas bridle at such an association. They see themselves as traditional doctors and soothsayers and argue they provide a vital supplement to conventional Western medicine, which has the thinnest of infrastructures in much of the continent.
Soon after taking power, the ANC embarked on the sensitive quest to marry Western with traditional medicine. Eskom, South Africa's state electricity corporation, became the first large employer to subscribe to Thamba, a health insurance scheme that covered visits to sangomas and nyangas. South Africa's Traditional Healers' Association, which has over 20,000 registered members, was wary of being regulated, and suspected at first that it might be an attempt to bring them into line. But the organization soon saw the financial merits of a scheme that allowed people to claim sangomas' fees on health insurance - and also potential lucrative spin-offs from the added publicity.
But it is not always as easy for Africa to reconcile two very different approaches to healing. What about the sangomas who claim they can cure Aids or even deny its existence? On paper no African government can afford to turn a blind eye to such bluster, and yet many do - with devastating results.
Professor Gordon Chavunduka, the Vice Chancellor of the University of Zimbabwe, personifies such contradictions. With a doctorate in medical sociology from the University of London, he is one of Zimbabwe's top academics; he is also a senior nyanga. When I met him, he headed Zimbabwe's association of traditional healers, which, he claimed, had 50,000 members. In his university office, with its gilt-framed picture of alumni in gowns and its view of a manicured campus lawn, he came across as a mirror image of his academic counterparts in Europe, until the conversation moved to the subject of witches.
'They exist, of course they do,' he said with the same steady conviction as the science teacher in Sekororo. 'I even decided to go out into the field as an academic to test my belief. They cause illness and death, forcing students to consult sangomas for the right counter-spells just before exams, and candidates to do the same before standing for parliament.'
Calmly but firmly, the professor denied there was a contra diction between his academic background and his beliefs. Rather, he said, people were fortunate to have a choice of how to be treated, even if this had, he admitted, had some unfortunate results, including a number of patients with grumbling appendixes who might have fared better, indeed might still have been alive, if they had gone straight to a medical doctor and not a nyanga. But he insisted that such mistakes were balanced by the nyanga's spiritual role.
To enter such a debate is to invite charges of cultural supremacist even though such reasoning is abused all over Africa in support of barbaric customs, notably female circumcision, an agonizing ritual decried by all women who have the opportunity and bravery to speak out. But other beliefs fall into a murkier category. They do not conform to the ideals of a modem state and yet discarding them can be a painful process. No leader more acutely sums up the dichotomy than King Mswati III of Swaziland, the only African state still run according to the old-fashioned ways.
The king is a keen Dire Straits fan and yet he is a polygamist with the right to choose his wives from an annual parade. He has to wrestle with all the usual socio-economic problems of a late twentieth-century Third World state. He is not a Big Man in the conventional sense. He is neither brutish nor corrupt. He is generally liked even by his opponents. But he is the closest Africa gets to an absolute monarch, is hailed as a semi-divinity with rain-making powers, and his attempt to reconcile his two worlds goes to the heart of one of Africa's fundamental dilemmas at the end of the twentieth century.
When I heard from Mbabane, his capital, in July 1996 that there was a chance he would agree to a rare interview, I put other plans on hold and headed to the twin peaks of Sheba's Breasts Mountain. There in Swaziland's misty Ezulwini Valley (Valley of Heaven) the King of the Swazis, the Lion Which Devours, Guardian of the Sacred Shields, Sire of the Herd, or Mak as he was known to his friends at Sherborne, holds court. My only stop on the way was in a small South African town to buy a sun-dress for my photographer so she would be suitably dressed for the king.
Negotiating an audience with the king had inevitably required a good deal of protoco
l. Five years before my visit, an American writer who was researching the world's monarchies learned his most important lesson about dealing with the Swazi court at the very end of his trip when he went out on the town to drown his frustrations at failing to secure a meeting with the king. 'Let the Swazis and English deceive each other with politeness and the Zulu and the Boer have it out with clubs,' he was told.' Subtlety is very much the Swazi way.
To understand the intricacies of the Swazi royal order I was advised to attend the Mhlanga, or Reed Dance, the annual southern spring pageant when the nation's maidens parade before the king. The British High Commissioner, John Doble, one of the last of the Buchanesque old-school diplomats, offered to escort me. He wore a kilt and sporran and brandished a Zulu stick. Not to be outdone, the commander of the royal regiment arrived wielding a golf club.
The ceremony had begun a week earlier in time-honoured form when the most respected Swazi matrons marshalled thousands of young women in regiments and marched them down to the Usutu river to pluck a reed. By the time we caught up with them, they were nearing their goal. In a flurry of head dresses and bead-skirts, as many as ten thousand bare-breasted women were swaying past the royal family in a vast meadow outside the queen mother's palace. The climax came as the king danced elegantly out at the head of an elite band of warriors, feinting this way and that, to inspect the women.
The parade was a cross between Trooping the Colour, a mass Morris Dance and a Moony marriage. The Mhlanga remains the best first place for the king to choose a bride. At his first Mhlanga the bashful young Mswati is said to have picked a wife by looking at a video of the dancers. On a subsequent occasion, a girl at Swaziland's International School, one of the best-known schools in southern Africa, is said to have fled the country after catching his eye. By the time of my interview, the king had six wives in all - although they had not all been picked from the annual parade.
For thousands of young Swazi women this was the highlight of the calendar, just as the Ncwala ceremony was for young men every December, when thousands went into seclusion with the king before ripping apart a live bull with their bare hands. The ceremonies provide a chance to preen or prance and crucially to feel involved in the royal life. But for the growing modernist movement they are emblematic of all that is outdated and distasteful about tradition. Mario Masuku, the head of the People's Democratic Movement, the main opposition movement, scoffed when I asked if he had attended the ceremony. Traditional ceremonies were fine if they were cultural displays, he said, but their feudal ties should come to an end.
'Conservatives say we want to make the king a play doll. That's not true. He is a unifying force. We need him here. It's just that tradition should be modernized and not manipulative.' And so the battle-lines are joined.
The foreign minister went first on his hands and knees. Then followed the head of the army and the chief of police, a jovial pot-bellied man who had already joked with me about his hawk-eyed officers who had stopped me for speeding on my way to the interview. I brought up the rear, heeding their advice that as a non-Swazi I could stay on my feet.
The king was already seated in a printed cloth robe and open sandals, with feathers in his hair. George Lys, his British tutor and mentor, a former Gurkha officer, stood discreetly to one side in a light grey suit. Outside, the praise-singers rounded off their routine before dispersing among the crowds of courtiers and princes who were lining the veranda.
If ever a leader had good cause to mistrust his siblings it is King Mswati. His father, Sobhuza II, is reputed to have had hundreds of children including more than sixty legitimate sons. During his sixty-one years on the throne he was widely admired for his skill in steering his mountain kingdom between the Scylla of Marxist Mozambique, which had banned traditional beliefs, and the Charybdis of apartheid South Africa. But the lessons of his statecraft did not last long in the royal court after he died, in his eighties, in 1982.
Mswati was preferred to his brothers, as was the royal tradition, because of his youth and disposition. As the youngest of the brothers he was the least 'tainted' and so the obvious choice, as the heir to the throne has to be unmarried. Mswati was also one of Sobhuza's favourites in the old king's dying days. But although the older princes had long known they were not in the running for the throne, all had an interest in influencing the succession, as favoured members of the Dlamini dynasty have the run of the land, or at least a head start in the juiciest deals. From the moment Sobhuza died, government of the country ground to a halt.
The course of Mswati's early years as king-in-waiting reads like a thrill-a-minute historical novel. As he was still a minor, Sobhuza's senior widow, Dzeliwe, took over as queen regent, but she rapidly offended hardcore traditionalists by not carrying out the old king's funeral rites in the correct way, appointing a favourite to act in her interests, and sending the young Mswati, or Makhosetiwe as he was then known, abroad to Sherborne for his education. Within months she had been toppled in a palace coup and replaced as regent by Queen Ntombi, Mswati's mother, whom the plotters wrongly thought would be easy to manipulate, and the heir was hastily brought back from Britain in the first of several interruptions to his studies.
The putsch provoked public demonstrations on behalf of the ousted 'Great She Elephant' - or so at least I gleaned in dribs and drabs during a confusing week trying to understand the Swazi court. Mswati was soon sent back to his foreign school, partly to keep him away from the skulduggery back home, and yet not even Sherborne was far enough. To the bewilderment of the Dorset police, a witch-doctor was found in the grounds, or so the rumours claimed, trying to bury a potion that was aimed at killing the king. It must have seemed a preposterous tale to the Sherborne staff but in Swaziland there were far stranger stories circulating of princes plotting to take power using special muti (medicine) with human body parts. All the while Mswati was flitting between his two very different worlds. During one half-term he accompanied an elite group of warriors on a trek to hunt down and kill a lion which had been specially imported from South Africa, to prove, as custom demanded, that he was greater than 'the one that devours man'.
The Swazis are sensitive about their traditions and bridle at the tendency of foreigners to view their kingdom as an anthropological theme park. Courtiers tartly suggest there is little difference between the royal lion hunt and the British royal family chasing foxes on horseback. Looking at King Mswati I found it easy to imagine him at Sherborne, where he was said to have been an able but unexceptional student, the exotic foreigner who played by the book and whom everyone liked but no one knew. Remarkably for an African leader he could hardly wait for the interview to start. Turning to me with a boyish smile that made him look younger than his twenty-eight years, he urged me to begin.
As I listened to him reminisce about his boyhood in the royal court I was irresistibly reminded of Evelyn Waugh's Black Mischief, which tells the tale of Seth, a young black ruler who returns from a public school education in England to take over a tiny African state and embarks on an energetic modernizing programme. His reforms soon come up against the potent forces of tribalism and tradition with catastrophic effects that ended in a coup, civil war, his overthrow and the daughter of the British envoy being served up as stew.
Such a scenario, albeit without the culinary climax, was not totally far-fetched when 'Mak' was summoned back from Sherborne at short notice without finishing his studies to be crowned as the world's youngest king in April l986. School rules dictated that he had to wear school uniform at all times during term time. On his flight home he changed into traditional dress but the appropriate sandals could not be found. Sherborne legend has it that he returned to his kingdom with feathers in his hair, painted robes on his back and sporting a pair of Dunlop Green Flash gym shoes.
Like Waugh's Seth, Mswati acted decisively on taking power. Within a month of his coronation he dissolved the supreme council, the Liqoqo, the shadowy body of advisors. He also rapidly dispensed with a number of the old guard. O
ne of the most powerful princes, Bhekimpi, was charged with treason on the grounds that he had treated the king like a boy - an offence which in the prince's defence it must have been easy to commit given Mswati's tender years. The minister of health, Prince Phiwokwakhe, was fired for incompetence, a charge unheard of in the royal court. He had been in charge of family planning, a key state policy in the light of Swaziland's exploding population, which was growing at more than 3 per cent a year, and yet he had six wives and reputedly more than forty children. But it seems likely that his dismissal had more to do with palace politics than with his contribution to overpopulation.
Mswati was moving far more cautiously, however, by the time of my interview a decade after his coronation. When he took power, his kingdom was an island of stability. But by the mid-Nineties the southern African stereotypes had been reversed: South Africa, the regional big brother, had moved triumphantly to democracy; even Mozambique had emerged from its ruinous civil war and held multi-party elections; but Swaziland was paralysed by mounting calls for democratic reforms. Thousands of striking workers brought the capital to a halt in 1996. Resorting to repressive colonial-era legislation, the police fought running battles with the demonstrators. By African standards the security forces were a model of restraint, but the use of tear-gas and batons was new to the Swazis. The old affectionate talk of Swaziland, as a toy town was a distant dream. There was a whiff in the air of the house of Stuart in the 1630s - or of Europe in 1848.
Critics said Mswati had been seduced by the trappings of power and had no interest in the weighty matters of state. There were reports of a playboy lifestyle. His new palace was said to have a glass-bottomed swimming pool and a designated disco dance floor. Hostile rumours trickled from the court that he was an unwilling pupil at his morning lessons. Malicious tongues recalled a rally early in his reign when the king addressed striking teachers sounding suspiciously as if he was drunk, and abused them in a most un-Swazi fashion. The next time he addressed a public meeting he was a model of contrition. 'The last time I addressed you the sun was very hot,' he explained.2 The nuance would not have been lost on his audience.