Mswati III

Mswati III is the last absolute monarch in Africa, and has ruled Eswatini since he was eighteen. He was born Makhosetive, one of more than two hundred children of Sobhuza II, and was chosen as heir while at school in England; he was recalled from Sherborne and crowned in 1986, four years after his father's death, during which the regency had been fought over by rival factions of the royal family. The constitutional basis of his power is his father's decree of 1973, which repealed the independence constitution, banned political parties and vested all authority in the king - issued when Mswati was five years old. A new constitution in 2005 guaranteed rights on paper while leaving the ban on parties and the king's power to appoint the prime minister, the cabinet and the judges intact. He governs jointly in traditional terms with the queen mother, the Ndlovukati, and appoints chiefs who control access to most of the land. Eswatini has one of the world's highest HIV prevalence rates, roughly a quarter of adults, and among the sharpest inequality; the king's expenditure - private jets, palaces for a large number of wives, and birthday celebrations costing millions - has been the specific occasion of protest for two decades. In 2018 he renamed the country Eswatini, its Swazi name, on the fiftieth anniversary of independence. Pro-democracy protests in 2021 were the largest in the country's history and were put down by the army with dozens killed; a prominent human rights lawyer, Thulani Maseko, was shot dead at home in 2023. He remains on the throne, and parliament remains advisory. He has fifteen or more wives, the first two chosen for him by the state in the traditional manner and the rest by himself. The annual Umhlanga reed dance at which he has selected several of them draws tens of thousands of young women and sustained international criticism. Eswatini is also the last African state to recognise Taiwan rather than the People's Republic of China.

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