Who is King Mswati III, the last absolute monarch of Africa who took center stage in Seville?

BarcelonaAmong the 60 heads of state and government who gathered in Seville this week for the UN summit on international cooperation, one particularly attracted attention for the distinguished and luxurious treatment of his entourage: King Mswati III of Eswatini, Africa's last absolute monarch. He is the ruler of what until 2018 was known as Swaziland, a small country that occupies half the area of Catalonia, nestled between Mozambique and South Africa. Seven years ago, the monarch celebrated his 50th anniversary, the same year as independent Swaziland, by renaming the country back to its pre-colonial name: eSwatini, meaning 'the land of the Swazis', the country's majority ethnic group. "We were mistaken for Swiss abroad," Mswati explained at the time, a mistake that makes sense in English (Swaziland/Switzerland). on the verge of overthrowing this retrograde monarchy with a popular pro-democracy revoltThe monarch, who was recently strolling through Seville and staying at the city's most luxurious hotel, accompanied by one of his wives (who hasn't been known to visit the shopping malls and clothing stores), lives in a very different reality than that of his 1.3 million subjects: he earns an annual salary of $50 million, at $1.90 a day. Protests demanding democracy have been repeated in recent years, in a country where unemployment was at 35.4% in 2024, and youth unemployment was projected to rise to 48.7%. Mswati III also controls economic power, with investments in the country's largest companies.

Mswati III, who became the world's youngest king in 1986, is the man who controls everything in his country. Despite the fact that the Constitution enshrines the separation of powers and allows political parties, in practice he fits the portrait of a feudal lord. He concentrates executive, legislative, and judicial power to punish the slightest criticism. In its latest report, from 2024, Amnesty International denounced the "extrajudicial executions" of human rights defenders in the country, "widespread political repression, especially arbitrary arrest and detention, exercised against journalists and other voices critical of the government."

16 wives and 35 children

But what has most caught the attention of the Spanish media have been the monarch's extravagant requests, such as putting the logo of his royal family on all the hotel towels they used or having a large photograph of him, in addition to his polygamy. Mswati III has traveled to Seville with his ninth wife, but he has 16 in total, with whom he has fathered 35 children. It is still far from the balance of his father, who had more than 200 children and 70 wives, but Mswati III has continued the family tradition of polygamy, a practice defended by the "unity of the clans." Eswatini is governed in civil matters by traditional law, which only allows men to add wives.

The modernity of the monarch is that he no longer chooses new wives in the Umhlanga (the Reed Dance), in which virginity and fertility are glorified -always women, of course-. Traditionally, the Swazi monarch used this festival to expand his harem. Now the celebration is basically a tourist attraction, but it's still a way to perpetuate machismo with the exhibition of the naked bodies of young women and men.

The king's love life is worthy of the playboys from the glossy magazine, including reports of a girl being kidnapped and a wife on the run. The lord and master of the country, Forbes He estimates that he has a fortune of more than 500 million dollars, which allows him to live a life of unbridled luxury with cars, planes, houses and trips. In addition, he has friends Generous, like the one who gave him 32 BMWs. And if that's not enough, the law requires the population to give him cows, a real treasure in a country with a rural, subsistence-based economy.