Photos were taken during only one of three short trips to Swaziland - a quick long-weekend camping jaunt, and unfortunately not enough pictures to create more than one panel. The panel of pictures does not really provide a glimpse of Swaziland, but does include some interesting items such as the traditional gourd bow, an "uhadi".

The first picture is of the Swazi market, a long-standing, well-known place for buying crafts, curios and Swazi cloth. Some Swazi cloth is worn by two of the women walking down the road in the second photo. The next photo is of a gentleman playing the uhadi and lastly, a beehive hut constructed by both the Swazi and Zulu.

The return route to Johannesburg, after exiting from Swaziland, goes through the province of Mpumalanga. This province includes the Kruger Park. The geographical diversity in the province of Mpumalanga is probably some of the greatest in the world. There is a wealth of game and bird life in the Lowveld, many scenic drives in the Drakensberg, and numerous grassland and wetland areas in the Highveld. The area is also of interest for the depth and diversity of its cultural heritage. Mpumalanga, means east or the place of the rising sun.

None of the accumulated photos, slides, etc, besides those shown on other pages such as the Kruger, paint a picture of this diversity very well. Here are a few pictures of parts of the Drakensberg Mountain range which is the geographical dividing point between the Highveld and the Lowveld. The picture to the left is in the area of "God's Window", the second picture near a place known as "The Three Sisters", the third of the road just south of the Kruger Park, and the last of a camping ground with the Drakensberg mountains in the background.

Once we drove from Johannesburg to the Loskop dam area on the highveld plateau to visit a farm where cheetah were being bred to assist in preventing their extinction. The paler cheetah was from Namibia, where its colour was more suited to the lighter shades of the surrounding semi-desert habitat. Some of the cheetahs were reasonably tame, and the visitors could approach them quite closely. In a sectioned-off area, one pair was separated for breeding purposes. At one time, they were being watched very closely by some related on-lookers.

Swazis
The Swazi people are part of the Nguni family (see the Zulus in KwaZulu-Natal). However, they were never conquerors, but developed a political system where the powers of the King are balanced by those of the Queen mother.

Swazi Festival - Rite of the First Fruits
The Incwala Festival takes place toward the end of each year, and is a sacred period of the nation from which outsiders are barred. The Festival is timed to coincide with the start of the northward journey of the sun after the summer solstice. The focus is on the King, and the role of the Queen Mother, though present, is that of an observer.

Excerpted from the book "Sangoma" by James Hall, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1994, page 44
(Hall also co-authored with Miriam Makeba, "Makeba: My Story")

"I had been in Swaziland three weeks, it was late December, and the Incwala, or Rite of the First Fruits, was underway in the Royal Village. Warriors began to appear at the homestead clad in leopard-skin skirts and carrying cowhide shields".

"The impressive ceremony was held in a large cattle enclosure built of tree branches. Thousands of warriors weighed down by heavy cow-tail shawls and women in full skirts, orange wraps, and black beehive hairdos danced slowly in place, in great lines, gravely singing a dirgelike invocation to the ancestors. It was my first chance to see young King Mswati, who was taller than most of his subjects and magnificent in a headdress of black, red, and white feathers. His entrance was greeted with a high-sustained whistling from the warrior regiments, and he carried himself with precocious confidence."

"The slow, ponderous dancing continued for hours to deep songs that mimicked the sounds of nature. Listening to the hard beauty of the men's voices, I seemed to hear the ages passing: the slow revolution of the earth on its axis, the arc of the moon across the sky, the weathering of the mountains. In their whistles could be heard the wind and the rain. In the trill of the women's voices I could hear the birds, the animals, the fecundity of nature. In the slow, sure redundancy of the dance steps I could feel the passage of the seasons, the endless progression of time."

The Uhadi (Xhosa), Ugubhu (Zulu) - Gourd Bow
This is a musical bow with an attached resonator - the gourd. The bow consists of string stretched between the ends of a flexible stick. The string is bowed or struck with a thin stick or stem of grass. By changing the distance between the mouth of the gourd and the player's chest, harmonic tones can be selectively resonated. Changing the position of the fingers of the left hand on the string alters the pitch. In the Swazi version, a brace divides the string to obtain two different "open" notes. While the playing of this instrument is almost a dying art, two well-known musicians play this instrument: Pops Mohamed and Madosini Manquina (see page on Grahamstown).

Swazi Beehive Huts
The base structure of the beehive huts is made by bending bunched sticks carefully to form a large dome. This is covered with woven grass mats. A thick thatching of about a foot thick is then fixed onto the structure. Ropes are used extensively to fasten everything together.

Swaziland Home Site
http://www.mintour.gov.sz/

Pops Mohamed, Madosini Manquina
On the page on Grahamstown.

Commemorative Cloth
http://www.sbic.co.za/gallery/commemcloth/clothfr.htm
Additional info on the page on Grahamstown.

Mpumalanga Province
http://mpumalanga.mpu.gov.za/mpumalanga_in_brief/brief_on_mpumalanga.html

Mpumalanga Tourism Authority
http://www.mpumalanga.com/