From Silicon Valley to Swaziland by Rick & Wendy Walleigh (read aloud txt) 📖

of the service. Music started playing, and we were told that we were expected to give a donation. I looked for the offering plates to begin making their way through the crowd. But no. This was a different type of donation and a different process. This donation was for the newly married couple, and it was to be placed in a container at the front of the hall. The music that began to play had a good beat for dancing, and that’s what we did. Essentially all of us in the congregation got up and danced our way to the front of the room to drop our donation in the box. Then we each danced our way back to our seats, all the time keeping to the beat of the music. It was joyful, somewhat controlled, chaos.

Shortly thereafter, the ceremony ended, and we followed the wedding party as they exited the auditorium and proceeded to where a late lunch was to be served. Since we had actually received an invitation to the wedding, we were among the “invited” guests and got to eat a sit-down lunch with the wedding party and family in one of the high school classrooms. The other three hundred plus guests had to queue up outside to go through a cafeteria line to receive their lunch served takeaway style in a Styrofoam container. Of course this isn’t bad if you haven’t actually been invited to the wedding. We learned that in the Swazi culture, when you have a wedding, you should assume that the whole village or congregation (or both) will attend, and you must prepare to feed everyone who attends. This can make planning very difficult, but they seemed to have plenty of food for over three hundred people.

The meal after the ceremony was very short, and it was just a meal. There were no other activities. After the long service, much of which had been joyous and beautiful, even if we didn’t understand it, the lack of a reception or party of some sort was a letdown. It felt like all the joy had disappeared with the end of the wedding, and now everyone went back to the daily basics, starting with just getting a meal.

Our exposure to the culture of Swaziland continued during the following week with preparations for the Reed Dance. The Reed Dance or Umhlanga (pronounced phonetically, but the “hl” sound is guttural and tough to get right) is one of the two most important Swazi festivals of the year and is written up as a “don’t-miss” event in all of the travel books. During the festival, which lasts several days, up to forty thousand young women from throughout the country come to the king’s lands in Ezulwini Valley. Here they gather reeds to take to the queen mother’s residence and repair her kraal (technically refers to a cattle pen similar to corral but often used to mean the entire homestead). On the next to last day of the festival, they present the reeds to the queen mother in an elaborate ceremony. On the last day of the festival, the young maidens parade and dance before the king and queen mother. Historically this was done so the king could choose an additional wife from among the crowd. In current custom, we were told that if the king wants another wife, he chooses ahead of time. And unlike his father, the current king wasn’t choosing a new wife every year. The current king had only fifteen wives whereas his father had more than eighty. Also traditionally, the young women would parade and dance completely naked, but modern ideas have impinged on this practice and now the women are at least somewhat clothed on the bottom. Most, however, do participate topless.

Although Wendy was not enthusiastic about the idea, I definitely wanted to see the event. The men in the office strongly encouraged us and suggested that we should attend in traditional Swazi costume. With some hesitation, we agreed and went out with Mkhululi (hum the m then “kuh-loo-lee”), another business advisor from our office, to purchase our attire. The important pieces in the traditional male outfit are as follows: a colorful necklace of fine beadwork in one of several traditional patterns; a long bright cloth wrapped around the torso and knotted to cover the right shoulder; two sarong-type skirts worn on top of each other, not at all matching the top cloth, knotted around the waist to expose the right leg; and a furry loincloth worn over the skirts. My loincloth consisted of two impala hindquarters, which meant that there was a tail bump suggestively protruding from the front, probably purposeful. At least I didn’t have to wear the traditional male underclothing. Evidently, this consists of a hollowed out gourd tied on with a leather thong. I’ll leave the specifics to the imagination, but just thinking about it made me uncomfortable.

Mkhululi had graciously agreed to go with us to the celebration, and so we agreed on a time to meet at his house on Monday. We had to make all of our arrangements early in the week because we both had busy schedules with clients on Thursday and Friday.

Even though Monday was a holiday, we got up early. We wanted to make sure we had time to shower, put on our native costumes, and drive to Mkhululi’s house in time for the festival. We had no idea as to what to anticipate in terms of crowds or how difficult it would be to park. As we were finishing up the struggle to properly attire ourselves, making comparisons to various pictures in the newspaper, magazines, and guidebooks, I got a phone call. It was Mkhululi.

He said, “I have bad news. I called my father this morning to borrow some of his traditional clothing. He asked me what I needed it for. I said that I needed it to go to the Umhlanga. He said, ‘Sorry, but the ceremony was yesterday.’ I said, ‘But today is the holiday.’ He said that today was the holiday only because it was Monday, but the celebration was yesterday. I am so, so sorry.”

My heart sank. We were all dressed up. It wasn’t a fortune, but we had spent several hundred dollars to look authentic. We were lucky enough to be in Swaziland just at the time of the Umhlanga, and we had missed it. I couldn’t be mad at Mkhululi because he had helped us with the clothing and had volunteered to escort us to the event. Around the office, we had mentioned that we were going on Monday, and no one had said anything. I didn’t know what to do. Mkhululi suggested that we go to the king’s lands where the thousands of young women were camping and the festival was held just to see if there were any activities planned for today. Based on our experience over the last two months, this made a lot of sense. In Swaziland, schedules for things like this were not well specified or publicized in advance. Somehow, people just kind of knew or found out. In fact, the specific date of the Umhlanga was only decided and publicized a few weeks prior. It’s not clear how the date is determined. If it were based on the sun or the moon, it certainly could be calculated years in advance, but it’s not. I guess that helps it retain some of the mystery, and more importantly, someone gets to retain his sense of importance because he gets to determine the date.

Not to look entirely stupid, we changed back into our regular clothes and drove to Mkhululi’s house. Mkhululi had just moved into his new house. While he was at work, his wife had done most of the moving and furniture arranging. She was exhausted and needed some sleep, so Mkhululi brought his one-year-old daughter along with us as we drove the few miles to the king’s lands. As we got close to the main festival site, we began to see lots of young women and the temporary infrastructure necessary to support them. It looked like the aftermath of a parade, the packing up of the circus, or the end of a Girl Scout camporee with some significant differences. As we approached, we crossed a small river on a one-lane bridge. Along the river banks, we could see dozens of young women washing their clothes and bathing. Those that were bathing were completely naked and seemed very comfortable with that fact. The Girl Scouts would not have approved.

We continued driving through the bustling crowds of young women and eventually arrived at a makeshift parking lot outside the gates to the king’s residence. A number of cars were parked, and there was a gaggle of police officers chatting among themselves. Mkhululi got out and approached one of the officers to find out if anything official was happening that day. He came back to the car and brought good news. Yesterday had been the ceremonial presentation of the reeds to the Queen Mother. However, today was scheduled for the parade and dancing for the king! We hadn’t missed it! The activities would start at 2:00 p.m. We would come back, and we wouldn’t even worry that the start was probably quoted in “Africa time.” It didn’t matter that we would have to sit and wait for a while; we were going to see the Reed Dance. We took Mkhululi back to his house and agreed to come back at 1:30 p.m.

After a few errands, lunch, and changing back into our traditional clothes, we drove back to Mkhululi’s house. His wife Katy was awake and would go with us to the Reed Dance along with their young daughter. Mkhululi had given us some coaching on our attire so now my two skirts were held up by knotting the ends of the cloth together rather than with safety pins, as had been the case this morning. The cloth around my torso still relied on the safety pins.

We piled into two cars and headed for the stadium at the king’s residence. As we approached, we had the same feeling that we’d had at Sonnyboy’s wedding, like arriving for an important high school football game in a small town, except here the crowds were bigger. We parked in crooked rows in a field next to the stadium and walked along the long fence to the stadium entrance. The metal detector we walked through at the entrance was something I’d never seen at a football game, but the feeling was still similar. The stadium had seats for probably five thousand spectators, but the parade ground in the center was over three times the size of a normal football field. The stands on the near side, next to the king’s reviewing area were full, so we had to walk around the entire field to get to the open seats. As we were walking, we went past thousands of half-naked young women lined up for their parade. We tried not to stare at them, and they tried not to stare too much at us. However, they were looking at us a lot. We definitely stood out. Out of probably four thousand spectators, we were among the less than 1 percent who were white and were probably the only white family in traditional dress. Did I say we stood out? And did I say that Mkhululi paraded us in front of most of the spectators in the stadium before we chose our seats?

Although we felt conspicuous, there was a friendly sensation coming from everyone who was looking at us. The people made us feel that we had made the right decision to dress traditionally. And we felt proud about how we looked. In fact, we got help on looking even better. As we were walking to our