Swaziland by Daniele Somenzi

Swaziland Massimo, Marco and I enter by car from South Africa at the western border. The road is well asphalted and stretches up and down, with dizzying curves to the right and left among woods of pines and firs. We soon understand the lushness of so many firs, hills full of them; at a certain point we see trucks full of logs heading to the sawmill near Mbabane, the capital. In Bhunya, the first little village we come across, we see that black people don't live in luxurious villas, but all in shacks, as is customary in these parts — though I'd say it's not a custom but an obligation. The buses are packed; few can afford a run-down car, let alone a new one. A multitude of black people walking to go to the sawmill; I already imagine with what union working hours and what wages.

The day before, on a car safari at Hluhluwe, I had sat outside on the car window and the little breeze of the speed refreshed me, but the sun still beat down hard on my bald head, and the result was that in the evening I had a collapse and fainted for the first time in my life, here in Swaziland like that. Since my stomach was in turmoil, we paid a visit to a doctor in Mbabane, who prescribed 2 kinds of pills to take for a few days to get my stomach back in shape. That evening we sleep in a decent hotel in the capital, the Holiday Inn, complete with a giant satellite dish in the garden next to the pool, to pick up CNN. A good sleep gets us back in shape. Curiously, at breakfast, the waiter, after serving us, brings us a kind of draughts with balls as a pastime, and Massimo starts playing; he says he'd already seen it, and in the blink of an eye he manages to solve it.

Just as well that for him it was the first time he came to Africa, and anyway to Swaziland. We leave Mbabane for the north, and here at the roadside we come across some clusters where we gladly stop and start bartering our clothes for wooden statuettes and little faces of black people carved in stone. Here in the north the fir hills end; evidently the trees have already been cut, and new ones will be replanted. All of Swaziland is a plantation that gives work to that one big joinery we saw; wood is the main source of income of this country bordering Mozambique and South Africa. We reach the northern border, where we get off and proceed with the rite of the passport visa. Everything goes smoothly without paying bribes of any kind; here in southern Africa there's no such custom as in the centre. bye bye