Prince Charles should be allowed to take his pick from rows of dancing debutantes in G-strings

Compared with the woes besetting our own royal family, the problems faced by the Swazi monarchy in adapting to the 21st century are minor. King Mswati III has just chosen his tenth wife. The wedding will not affect his marriage to the existing nine. There may be lessons here for Prince Charles.

I have recently returned from a short visit to Swaziland, where I was educated as a boy. The country is about the size of Wales. Hilly, fertile and well-watered, and landlocked between the top right-hand corner of South Africa and the bottom left of Mozambique, this sweet and peaceful little place is unusual for being more or less conterminous with the modern homeland of a single tribe. Almost all the inhabitants of Swaziland are Swazis, and this has rescued their nation from the furies and fractures which beset so many African nations.

For much of its modern history Swaziland was a British protectorate, one which in many respects our colonial governors tactfully allowed to rule itself. The country sidestepped most of the struggles which ravaged southern Africa throughout the last century. This was and is in the most splendid sense a backwater: a mountain redoubt.

Partly as a result, and because the Swazi people’s own history and identity are so rich and strong, the nation’s monarchy – in reality an exceptionally well-defined and centralised African chieftainship – has survived remarkably intact. The Swazi royal family has turned itself into an apparatus of 21st-century government. On its surface the country is part-democratic but at its core governance there is characterised by that delicate and peculiarly African counterpoint of hierarchy and consensus – profoundly conservative, authoritarian yet somehow sensitised to the nerve-endings which are its rank and file – whose capture in language eludes European sociologists. A successful African chief is no democrat, but he is always listening.