The cemetery of Swazi goodness

Our boasting of uniqueness as a nation has become so frequent that it has reached extremely boring proportions. We always say we are unique without stating how and why.
Every nation is unique in its own way. Italians, Germans, French and the Britons are all Europeans but are all unique in their own different ways. Their uniqueness is the reason why they keep visiting one another.
They recognise their being different from one another in mannerisms, culture, architecture and terrestrial configuration. That is why tourists also come to Swaziland. The fact that we are in Africa along with other countries does not make us the same as them just as France being in Europe doesn’t make it the same as the other European countries.
That is why we have French and Italian restaurants to emphasise and commercialise the differences of their uniqueness.
But, what are we doing to benefit from our uniqueness as Swazis? We hardly have anything documented and sold on ourselves!
The National Libraries, National Museum, the King Sobhuza II Memorial and the National Archives are tightly closed during holidays and parts of the weekends when the vast majority of the populace, including tourists have the time and leisure to go into them and benefit from their services.
The general assumption is that every local knows everything in them and that Swazis have all the time in world to visit them during normal working hours. This is a typical scenario of services being available but not being delivered. 
How can shops hope to make money when they close at the same time with all other businesses at a time when workers are free to purchase what they sell at their own pace and leisure without having to worry about their own bosses at work? Service delivery is not only about politics but our daily living.
If your objective is to deliver knowledge, you don’t have to compete with the school hours? You have to compliment instead of competing. If delivering your service entails expenditure on extended working hours and extra personnel, so be it. 
Otherwise, how could you measure your performance indicators? Benefits of certain services can never be measured in monetary terms yet they have an untold beneficial impact on the overall economy.
Giving evening hours only to fun lovers and drunkards is not being fair to the economy and the general citizenry who may want to engage in serious work of self upliftment and improvement.
It’s about time we found expression about ourselves and to ourselves. Most of us do not know who we are as an indigenous Swazi people except through the eyes of what Jim Gama (Mbhokane) and Bongani Austin Dlamin (Gcokosiyancinca) define as being truly Swazi in their bi-weekly Radio Programme, “Khala Mdumbadumbane”.
Much as these two sons of the soil are doing a heroic and sterling job about tackling the values and virtues of our being what we are and who we are, we still need an official document defining critical and key aspects of our common practices and mannerisms as an organised cultured nation with its own unique identity.
Through the infusion of other cultures in a globalising world with an efficient and effective communication network, we might find that what we consider to be authentically ours is a diluted version of what used to define us. His Majesty King Mswati III also sensed the threat and commissioned a group of respectable Swazi men and women under the chairmanship of Amon Mangaliso Dlamini (Now Prince Logcogco and Chief of Gundvwini) to undertake a research and national consultation with a view to codifying Swazi Law and Custom.
Prince Logcogco is a distinguished scholar who taught me Contract Law at the then University of Botswana and Swaziland (UBS). God knows what happened to the document because he never presented it in the Royal Cattle Byre at Ludzidzini when His Majesty ordered him to present it alongside Prince David who was presenting his Constitution document.
Maybe he didn’t want to trivialise this important document by presenting it in the same forum as the Constitution. I am happy now that the Prince is beginning to open up on the document and is now beginning to quote snippets from it though it is not yet available to us as members of the public.
One would only hope that His Royal Highness will not end up being like the missionaries of the past centuries who used to be the only ones privileged to have the Bible and quote from it.
Like the late Indvuna yeTinkhundla, Mndeni Shabalala, the real Tinkhundla document was only known to him and the rest of us had no option but to take everything that came from their mouths as the gospel truth.
There lies the graveyard of every good thing that is Swazi. It is hardly documented and is passed through the word of mouth. We are so averse to writing it begs description.
Even the little that is known is kept to as few members of the inner circle as possible and including the knowledge about plants that were used to make effective cures for various serious ailments which have resurfaced to be a serious menace in modern day societies.
The tendency of doling out the truth in bits and pieces like dwindling peanuts seems to be endemic in the Swazi System of administration. Why didn’t Mndeni Shabalala give us the whole truth about the Tinkhundla Philosophy instead of giving us his own version peppered with falsehood about the unchangeable nature of its application?
The danger of doling out the truth is that by the time someone comes out to give the whole true picture, he is labelled a liar and an apologist of the system who is trying to make a holy angel of a devil in horns!
First impressions last and last forever. It is said that there is no second chance to make the first impression. Do you remember the legendary story of a fast lizard and a slow chameleon? It is said that God the Creator sent one of these two creatures to deliver a message to mankind.
The message was to tell the human race that it would never experience death. God assigned the slow chameleon to deliver this all important message. Unfortunately, an eavesdropping lizard overheard the instruction and become jealous of the chameleon which was to be the bearer of good tidings and was bound to be recognised and respected as God’s Special Envoy.
On hearing this, the lizard decided to run as fast as it could and overtook the chameleon along the way to give the Human race a contrary message to the effect that God had declared that people were destined to die.
When the chameleon eventually arrived with the right message the people jeered it and chased it away dismissing it as a liar. It is said that is the reason why people die today because they believed the first message that was brought by the lizard.
I wish our national leaders could learn something from this somewhat childish fable. They should deliver the whole truth the first time so that the nation sees it for what it is instead of being left to speculation. Trying to dissuade the nation from the balderdash that was fed to it about the Tinkhundla philosophy has now become almost a mission impossible, which thing plays well into the hands of the country’s detractors. I hope Prince Logcogco reads this and reads it well.
It was quite impressive to hear him quote from his yet to be presented secret document on the validation of marriage according to Swazi Law and Custom.
As it is, the whole country is already in turmoil on this issue because you are not allowed to register marriage according to Swazi Law and Custom unless you have paid a certain number of cattle as lobola. As a result, a lot of people end up lying thus committing purgery about lobola just to be issued with a marriage certificate.
The process would have long been corrected had the Prince’s document been presented for final approval. With this government official practice on the issuance of Swazi Custom Marriage Certificates, how else could we have expected Her Lordship Justice Qinisile Mabuza to have judged the case between the Ntjakala and Mhlanga families?
She issued judgment to the effect that Swazi marriage was only valid if lobola had been paid which thing was later disputed by the Prince who quoted from his mysterious document. He was supported by our governor Jim Gama in his stance.
The Prince’s document will enable the whole nation to talk with one voice on what sets us apart from other nations. Such information would boost and enrich our tourism information in addition to making us understand ourselves and act with a common purpose on crucial matters.
One of the starkest national examples of doling out the truth is when we were all forcefully made to pierce our ears by the government ostensibly at the Royal Command of our Head of State, King Sobhuza II. 
This they said was meant to make us look like Swazis of long ago and prove our national identity.  So serious was the situation that some people organised themselves into vigilantes who would go about sniffing for people who didn’t want to comply with the “King’s Order” and forcefully pierce their ears using crude instruments like office paper punctures.  During the struggle some people’s ears were lacerated. 
Some people even ran away from their homes in case the “enforcers” arrived in the middle of the night or early morning hours. Yours truly was among the last people to reluctantly get his ears pierced. It cost 20 cents, which amount could buy you two loaves of white bread then. So people with the skill were making quite a fortune.
I had never experienced such a painful thing in my whole childhood. The piercing was done with a knife and the hole was to be kept open with a sizeable stump of reed until it healed.   Sometimes the stump would accidentally come off, especially during your sleep and re-entering it was quite a tearful experience.
Pain killers were a rarity during those days. Some people would jump in pain during the piercing thus getting them seriously lacerated and hurt. Some pupils dropped out of school in fear. Schools were not spared from invasions by the self-appointed enforcers.
By the time His Majesty came to the rescue over the air and clarified what he meant, it was already too little too late. His people were already bleeding. He stated that when he said that people should pierce their ears he was using a metaphor to mean that people should listen carefully and pay attention to detail whenever he said something.
He did not mean that people should pierce their ears in the literal sense. From that time, I made it my policy never to leave any interpretation of an official pronouncement to chance. Like the Biblical doubting Thomas, I want to see everything with my own naked eyes. People always try to be smart with vital information given in trust even if they do not understand it. 
What is usually meant for onward transmission to members of the public is immediately covered with a veil of secrecy and turned into a secret Bible from which the trusted messenger will dole half – truths whenever it suits his own ego.

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