Hmmm…Apparently, this dance isn’t just about dancing naked. The king picking new wives amongst the dancers is part (the whole point?) of the ceremony :
*The annual Zulu Reed Dance tradition is a festive ceremony whereby the Zulu King Zwelithini is entertained by Zulu maidens. If a lady catches his eye he can choose her for his wife. He currently has five wives the last of which he claimed at a Reed Dance in 1993. *
Another cite :
*Disgruntled subjects in eastern Swaziland are boycotting this weekend’s **Umhlanga Reed Dance, an annual pageant at which the king picks a new bride *, in protest against a chieftaincy row that may see them being evicted from their ancestral land.
The annual Reed Dance lasts six days. A large group of girls set out to cut reed; for six days they dance before the King,* hoping to be chosen to become yet another of his wives or concubine. **
There are two groups of protagonists in the film: King Mswati III and the members of the royal family, and ** four fifteen-year-old girlfriends, students from one school, who think what to do to make the King notice just one of them during the Reed Dance and choose one of them for his wife or concubine ** *
So, the whole ceremony seems to actually be a contest to become a spouse or concubine of the king.
That’s what the OP’s link says. But knowing that the girl participated in a “become the king’s next wife” contest and given that ** Duck Duck ** has read reports which made him think that the whole story is somewhat fishy, perhaps it’s actually fishy. The fact the mother claims her daughter has been abducted doesn’t make it true. We don’t know the king’s point of view, and not even the daughter’s point of view.
I’m more and more dubious of main source “expert” reporting. Frustrating, because it forces outsiders like me to filter their smug biases through my own.
My take? (Which is worth exactly nil, btw.) Most ceremonial festivals, even ours, have all kinds of symbolism and meanings underneath. Danged few of 'em are intended to be taken literally. Halloween trick or treating doesn’t equal devil worship. It’s possible, and I maintain customary, for people to embrace celebrations on all kinds of levels. I don’t think any outsider, and few insiders for that matter, can say X celebration means Y.
The fact that the mother bucked an impossibly–impossibly–loaded system at all suggests a lot to me. It isn’t a ridiculously litigious society like ours. She’s lost hugely and has damned more to lose by even protesting. It’s a society in the throes of rapid change. Her daughter could have participated, celebrating her people and culture, without realizing how little actual power structures had changed.
Qui bono? Certainly not the mother, other than trying to get her daughter free… to a life where their futures are moot. At the very best, they have no future in their own land: mother, daughter, boyfriend.
I’m croggling that anyone could examine this situation, inadequately reported as it probably is, and project comfy prom queen assumptions onto it. Our cultural changes are wrenching; why assume that any people’s lives are so easily packaged?
As I saw it on the BBC the reed dance is mostly a cultural event, a passing of age of sorts. The fact that it was originally intended as a mass date for the king is just a side effect. What I heard most saying is that it is a tradition.
Even if the whole thing was about the king picking a wife, it is still not justifiable the kidnapping/rape thing (I assume that it was rape, even if it was sans violence). When you say NO, it doesn’t matter what you had said or done before, the NO stands.
Miller, you are so caught up in the tragedy and romance of the Abducted Bride that you have quit paying attention to the facts.
Um, what? Excuse me? She’s now a Fiancee, or did you not notice that? In line to become an actual Queen. Who said anything about prostitution? Prostitutes are discarded when the thrill is gone–Zena’s officially acknowledged, he’s stuck with her now. And nobody forced her. How many times do I have to say that? She volunteered.
Bullshit. Every single one of those 20,000 girls knows exactly what the Reed Dance is for. “Social event” my ass.
The first thing you learn about the Swaziland Reed Dance, if you Google it, is that it’s an “an annual pageant at which the king picks a new bride”:
Notice that it’s up to the adults of Macetjeni whether they want to send their daughters to the ceremony. They feel that their daughters belong to them. Lindiwe Dlamini feels that her daughter belongs to her. This isn’t about an Abducted Bride and a Grieving Mother–this is about theft. And furthermore, it’s about theft from a couple of not-very-bright people, sorry.
When the King starts calling, Mom gets worried and flees with Zena to Switzerland. And then–they came back? I mean, geez. Okay, I’m trying to visualize myself in this situation. The Cat Who Walks Alone, who is 18, has inadvertently attracted the attention of the king, who is an absolute monarch and a major PITA. She repulses his advances, but things do not look good. Any day now she may be forced to join him in his palace. So what do I, as a caring mother, do? Well, evidently I have enough money to go live in Switzerland.
So I do.
And then after a while, what, somebody in the king’s entourage calls me up and says, “Hey, we found a loophole, your daughter’s ineligible, you can come back.” Annnnnd–I believe him? Because, what, I don’t know that this king doesn’t take “no” for an answer, I’m so stupid that I haven’t heard all the talk about how he suppresses people who disagree with him, and I don’t realize that he’s basically a total dictator? So I just ignore all that–and I come back? With my daughter?
Yeah right. :rolleyes:
Oh, so your position is that it’s just a sort of innocent Fourth of July celebration, with moms and babies and grandmas and picnic blankets and things, and all the teenage females just happen to be naked? Sheesh, get a clue.
Pictures of real life Swazis. I can’t help noticing that none of the females are naked, or even slightly naked. Or is that just the photographer’s bias? Afraid to post pix of nekkid Africans on the Internet?
In Swazi culture, as in American culture, female public nudity equals female sexual availability, no matter what the date rape laws may say. “See this? You like?”
**Ah, I love the way the logic dances around there. I "extrapolated’ that the girls were “hoping to be kidnapped”? No, I said that the girls were hoping to be chosen as queen, not hoping to be kidnapped.
In your anxiety to be politically correct and weigh in on the side of the poor downtrodden female, you continue to ignore the basic fact that the poor downtrodden female volunteered for this. Evidently she’s changed her mind, and apparently so has her mother. I’m sorry for both of them, but sheesh, they both knew exactly what might happen when she joined the group going down to the Reed-Cutting Ceremony.
The Swazi King chooses wives at the Reed Ceremony. Fact. And moreover, a fact that’s known to every travel agent in the world, let alone the folks who actually live in Swaziland.
I also noted while reading up on this that the whole Reed Ceremony, from start to finish, takes several days. It’s not like 20,000 naked teenagers suddenly parade past the king during one afternoon. They cut reeds, and they march down to the Queen Mother’s palace, and they sing songs, and stuff like that. It sounds like a sort of Girl Scout Jamboree. So Zena could have bowed out at any time and gone home, took a pass on the thing.
** Oh, gee, let’s compare girls who audition as a sex partner with women who happen to be wearing tight clothes…How marvelously irrelevant.
Again, you’re not paying attention and you continue to introduce irrelevancies. We’re not talking about “sex” here, we’re talking about marriage. I wouldn’t be happy if either one of my daughters announced she was going to marry a man she barely knew but who was rich and powerful, but I wouldn’t be so appalled that I’d pack up and move with her to Switzerland.
**Geez, talk about not paying attention. It’s not a fucking sock hop, Miller.
Sex and sexuality is a big issue in Swaziland. They have one of the highest HIV/AIDS rates in Africa. Male promiscuity is a huge part of the culture; the women are chattel. You’re imposing Western values on this culture when you use words like “prostitution” and “rape” in conjunction with this whole Swazi bride thing. This is the way the culture works–the women are “chosen”, they’re “taken”, and it’s not “rape” or “prostitution”, it’s “marriage”.
It’s a mistake to read this whole thing as a Phyllis Whitney Gothic romance with the Abducted Bride weeping into her hanky. This is how Zena’s culture works.
Okay, for the last time: Nobody forces any of these girls to appear at the Reed Dance. No jackbooted thugs go and drag all the eligible virgins out of the bosom of their families to appear naked before the king. If they don’t want to be picked as the next queen, all they gotta do is stay home.
I’m sorry that Mom is sad she isn’t going to be able to have contact with her daughter now that she is officially a Fiancee, but many mothers don’t have any contact with their daughters once they get married.
And I’m sorry that this girl evidently has changed her mind about wanting to be Queen, but hey, that’s part of life, you pays your money and you takes your choices. I note that Zena is 18, and in America, she could vote, get married, sign up for as many credit cards as she wanted, buy a house or a car, run for public office, have an abortion, and join the Army, all without her mother’s consent. Teenagers screw up but life goes on.
I turned up another inadvertent Swazi bride while Googling around for this. Wife #1, in 1985.
She was 16, he was the 17-year-old Crown Prince. She says she went to the ceremony “just to dance” (which I believe of a 16-year-old), he spotted her in a video of the Reed Dance, he proposed marriage, she thought he was joking, she was astonished and thrilled, she accepted. Where is she now?
BTW, it’s a truly pathetic picture 60 Minutes has painted there, poor little Zena in the church pew. Starting out with an emotional bang:
Oh, yeah, grab the viewer’s attention right away, so they don’t switch over to ABC and watch the Disney movie. The fact that the Reed Dance is actually a deliberate audition is barely mentioned, and it’s buried under the weight of the hugely emotional “child abduction” story.
So either she’s extremely stupid, or her mother is extremely stupid, or her mother is lying to CBS. Or all of the above.
I suppose that since there were 20,000 other girls, both Wife #1 and Wife #10 assumed that the odds were against them. Well, that’s what happens when you gamble–sometimes you lose.
The girl (even if she wanted it before, craved for it, dreamed about it eveyr night and it was the sole reason why she participated in the reed dance) changed her mind at the last moment.
She came back from Switzerland only AFTER she believed Zena was safe.
The mother demanded the return of her daughter.
The way I see it, it is still abduction. ‘Property’ or not, I don’t see how it makes it any more hideous. She is a human being, not a cow, and therefore deserves not to be pushed into an unwanted relationship.
Honestly, ** MIghty girl **, after reading all ** Duck Duck ** sites, I’m not really convinced that the daughter has been abducted against her will.
It seems to me that she wanted to become queen and ended up only concubine. Her mother at least is pissed off. Would she have been upset if the daughter was the official 10th wife?We don’t know…apparently she only began to protest after it became clear that her daughter wouldn’t be queen (If I understand correctly). Is the daughter herself upset? We don’t know, either.
The OP link isn’t an actual inquiry about the intricacies of this issue, but merely a sensationalized report of the mother’s (and mother’s lawyer) point of view.
I would personnally abstain from making a judgment on such a flimpsy basis.
60 Minutes doesn’t say exactly when the abduction was supposed to have taken place, but I found this. The Boyfriend speaks. He says that Mom was the one who initially brought Zena to see the King. He says they came back from Switzerland on October 6 and the abduction was October 9.
Note: This article’s date is November 9, not September 11.
So apparently the Reed Dance goes on a lot longer than I thought, because the BF says the King spotted Zena on September 15. Or maybe it moves around to different venues.
Anyway, what this all says to me is that on September 15 she went bare-breasted, as an audition, and that she knew full well that there was a chance she’d be chosen, and also, since she was in the company of no less a personage than Miss Swaziland, who is dating the BF’s older brother, that she stood an excellent chance of catching the king’s eye. She and Miss Swaziland went to see the king (“Oh, I just wanted to ask the king for a sponsorship and a bursary…”), and voila! Success.
Nope, you can’t persuade me that this is an innocent abducted virgin, no way. She knew exactly what she was doing. She auditioned, she got the part–and now she’s happy.
So she appears in church, and Lara Logan of CBS thinks she looks “overwhelmed”. Well, yeah, look at it from Zena’s perspective–she thought it was just a career move, fulfilling her destiny as Somebody’s Wife, and she even managed to snag the King himself as that Somebody–and here suddenly it’s a media firestorm, and her mother is filing lawsuits and being harassed, and to top it all off, I can’t imagine that the previous wives are making it easy for the Newbie. In many polygamous societies, it’s traditional for the Old Wives to be absolutely beastly to the New Wife, and why should Swaziland be any different?
So she catches the king’s eye on September 15, and then on September 23 it’s announced that he’s evidently going with his original choice for #10, so Zena’s out, unless she can get him for #11 next year, which seems doubtful, as he likes them young (he’s looking for healthy teenage brood mares, remember), and at 19 she’ll probably be too old, but she won’t quit talking to him on her cell phone, dammit, so Mom packs her off to Switzerland.
And when they come back, the King, annoyed at the slap in the face (“she’s mine”) sends his people to fetch her.
And so Mom files her lawsuit, because reading the stories about the “tassel casting” thing, where she simply bundled all the tassels into a Hefty sack with a big “fuck you” to the Outraged Maidens, she sounds to me like One Tough Lady, but now she’s being harassed, so she belatedly tries to enlist the help of the Western media, and 60 Minutes obligingly airs only her side of the story, which she has slanted to turn it into the Story of the Abducted Virgin Bride instead of the Story of the Teenager Who Won’t Listen To Her Mother And Who Thinks She Knows What’s Best For Her Life.
It doesn’t seem to be just the mother claiming she was abducted. From the link, “The king’s aides found Zena here at her school. Witnesses say two men grabbed her and were seen forcing her into a waiting car. Zena appeared to be resisting. The last time they saw her, she was in the back seat sandwiched between the two men as the car sped away.”
I think that could certainly be read as sensationalized, and I completely agree with you that we don’t know the king’s point of view or Zena’s. It’s tough to know all of the facts. The interview with the king did seem to be an exercise in side-stepping, that may not mean anything either, but it couldn’t have hurt to set the public “right” in that interview so I’m not sure why he didn’t. I realize it’s old news now, but still think there is a case for this being more than sour grapes on the mother’s part.
Well, those are indeed some pretty goddamned impressive cites, Duck Duck Goose. I’m still not convinced your interpretation of these events is correct, but it looks a lot more reasonable than it did earlier. Sorry for the harsh tone of my previous post.
It seems to me that this is what the mother is saying. I don’t see any evidence in this piece that the journalists made any independant inquiry…There’s no interview of the “witnesses”, for instance
If that’s the bar that’s now been set for cites, I’m never posting again without at least half the McLennan Library behind me. Not even about my own CHILDHOOD. Yeesh.
I don’t think there’s any way that anybody will ever really know what’s going on over there, Miller, at least not from reading second and third-hand news accounts on the Web. As I was going through all this stuff, I kept coming across quotes from Kingie that made him sound like the most eminently reasonable guy you could imagine (“hey, I love this girl, and we wanna get married”), and I had to forcibly remind myself that this is the same guy who passes a five-year ban against female virgins having sex–and then goes ahead and moves his fiancee into the palace and presumably has sex with her, fining himself a cow when the palace is stormed by angry villagers. He seems very cheerful about the whole thing, but obviously he’s playing by a different set of rules than the rest of us.
For one thing, he’s now reportedly endangering his entire country’s trade relations by insisting on buying a $45 million dollar jet that his Parliament, such as it is, has already voted down, citing better uses for the money, like “food” and “medicine”.