We were packing for a visit Eswatini, once known as Swaziland.
It was 2012 and my daughter, Thandi was then 8. The little American with a Swazi name that means beloved was at the dining room table of our home in Johannesburg, South Africa. She looked up from writing on a page she’d torn from her pink notebook to ask me whether ``color’’ has a U. I tell her it can in South Africa and next door in Eswatini, where British spellings rule.
She showed me what she’d been working on. It was a flyer offering free manicures and pedicures _ in all her many nail polish colours _ to the women and girls on the Swazi homestead, a family subsistence farm, we’re headed to visit.
Spa La Thandi’s treatments are ``not really free,’’ she tells me. ``Because it makes me happy.’’
When we first took Thandi to meet the Swazis who hosted my husband when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1990s, she was small enough to take a bath in a plastic basin used to wash dishes. Handy, given that all the family’s water had to be hauled in buckets from a well a half mile or so away.
Eswatini is a landlocked country of 1 million people a bit bigger than Connecticut and surrounded by South Africa and Mozambique. We had visited once or twice a year since moving in 2008 to South Africa, where I worked as an Associated Press foreign correspondent. Now, preparing to move back to the US, we had to go tell our Swazi family goodbye.
Thandi had grown big enough to go along with her Swazi sisters to fetch water. She used to be skittish of the chickens in the yard, but learned to enjoy chasing the roosters.
She knew the routine at the border. Out of the car and in one door on the South African side to register our car with customs, walk down the counter to show our passports at immigration, out the other door and back in the car to be waved under the boom at the gate. This time, the guard at the gate wanted to know whether we had a lap top computer. He sent us back to register mine at customs, a bit of red tape we’ve not encountered before.
Eswatini had become a harsher and more suspicious place than it was when I first visited my husband in the 1990s and thought he was lucky that Peace Corps had sent him to such a beautiful ``pocket kingdom.’’ In the 2000s, journalists had been stopped at the border by police and turned back.
The lap top question turned out to be a mere formality. And we got no questions at all from the Swazi bureaucrats across the border. No attempt to smoke out journalists who might be planning to expose what Eswatini has become. I’ve done my share of those stories, and edited others from a brave Swazi stringer.
But this is a personal visit, the lap top along only in case of emergency.
Few Americans may know Eswatini even exists. Those who do may think of it as a quaint anachronism. Sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarchy, with an annual festival at which the king can choose yet another bride from among bare-breasted young women dancing before him holding reeds aloft.
The prime minister once claimed ``development partners’’ gave the king a DC9 plane for his birthday. This in a country where a third of the workforce was jobless and two-thirds of the population was poor. The state treasury, plagued by corruption and mismanagement, was once in such bad shape that the government stopped distributing free AIDS drugs. Tens of thousands of Swazis depend on AIDS drugs handed out at government hospitals. The country has had the world's highest percentage of people living with the virus that causes AIDS.
The university has repeatedly opened late because it was strapped for cash, and the government has cut spending on tuition subsidies and school supplies for high and elementary school students. Swazis revere their traditions, monarchy chief among them, but economic hardship has led to calls for democracy. Police have used water cannon, tear gas, beatings and arrests to put down demonstrations.
Swazis can seem like a big family. The phone book _ just one for the entire nation _ has page after page of Dlaminis, the main clan. Walk the streets and you’ll see the same face over and over: broad foreheads, narrow eyes set wide apart, exquisite smiles.
At least once every time I visit, I find myself thinking: ``There’s ANOTHER Sobhuza-looking guy.’’ Another old man walking along a dirt road with the graying hair and wise eyes seen in portraits in homes and government offices across Eswatini that depict King Sobhuza II.
Sobhuza was 83 and had ruled for 61 years when he died in 1982. He had overseen his nation’s peaceful transition to independence from Britain in 1968 and steered it through the Cold War and the turbulence apartheid South Africa created in the region. Perhaps in Sobhuza’s day, his fatherly guidance was enough. But more and more Swazis are saying they want to be treated like citizens, not children.
Not that everyone is sure democracy is the answer. Some just want a better, more responsive and more responsible king. Someone more like Sobhuza. Discarding the monarchy seems too much like discarding Swazi identity, cutting loose from a comforting anchor in a fast-changing world.
We made our way through the border and quickly ran out of tarred road. We kicked up red dust for 15 minutes, then climbed a rise to the homestead presided over by Magey, a widow who lost her husband in a mining accident in South Africa.
The homestead had no running water. A few years ago, we bought the family a hut-size, green plastic water tank , which at least cuts down on trips to the well during the rainy season. Since Magey had an electricity line run to one of several small, cinder block, tin roofed structures that sit around the well-swept dirt yard of her homestead, she can charge her cell phone without having to walk to the next homestead. And her children and grandchildren can watch South African soap operas, soccer matches and the news on a TV she’s installed in one room.
With every visit, we have found another addition to the homestead, a child or grandchild dropped off by one of Magey’s city cousins. Life is cheaper on the homestead. Parents know their children will be fed and cared for with Magey, whatever crises may be befalling families in the cities.
Almost as soon as Thandi jumped from the car, she started lining her polish bottles filled with nail polish in jewel-like colors along the low wall surrounding a porch outside Magey’s bedroom. Girls from neighboring homesteads gathered with Thandi’s sisters to await turns in a chair dragged from inside. Salon La Thandi was an immediate success.
Fred and I chatted with Magey, sitting on a ledge of the maize drying rack. The sun set, and the sky filled with stars. There were few electric lights to compete with the firmament.
We knew it would be hard to keep track of what was happening in Eswatini once we were back in the US. Even in neighboring South Africa, media pay only sporadic attention to the troubled kingdom.
I did not unsubscribe from the email lists of Swazi labor and human rights activists who have been leading pro-democracy campaigns, though I know I’ll have to read their messages with a certain skepticism. They tend to overstate the readiness of most Swazis for radical change. When pressed, they admit that when they talk about democracy in tradition-bound rural areas, they are accused of being un-Swazi. That may be the result of propaganda from the monarchy, which depicts democracy’s proponents as just short of devils.
The monarchy controls newspapers and broadcasters in the kingdom, and when we left officials were working on a law to go after people who insult the king on Facebook and Twitter.
The worst I’ve heard Magey say about the king is that he’s selfish. Come to think of it, that’s a harsh indictment. If people were starting to think such things in the countryside, perhaps the definition of what is and isn’t Swazi will turn out to be beyond the control of the king’s propaganda machine.
We asked Magey to send us messages keeping us up to date on family affairs through a cousin who works in town and has email and Facebook.
We spent two nights on the homestead. Thandi was busy with her salon, except for a morning helping with the maize harvest. I’m sure our extra hands were appreciated in the fields, even if one pair was small, and my pair took time out from picking to take photos.
On our last morning, we were called into the kitchen, where anything of importance is discussed. We sat around the wood-burning stove, and one of Magey’s daughters started a song:
``It is time to say goodbye. Goodbye. Because we may never meet again.’’
Gogo, Magey’s mother-in-law, called a grandchild to kneel next to her on the floor, where she was reclining on a grass mat made of the same reeds the maiden’s wave before the king. The grandchild translated as Gogo told us she expected us to come back for her funeral. She has often said this to tease Fred. This time, there was no laughing.
I thank everyone for embracing us as family when we were so far from our own.
I’d been trying not to think of this as our last visit to Eswatini. I’d been hoping to leave without tears. But, now that everyone is crying, I realize that this is the only way to say goodbye.