The Umhlanga Reed Dance in Swaziland 🇸🇿 #eswatini - Read Description Below

The reed dance in Eswatini is an annual event that is done by girls who are still virgins in honour of the king.

Umhlanga [um̩ɬaːŋɡa], or Reed Dance ceremony, is an annual Swazi event. In Eswatini, tens of thousands of unmarried and childless Swazi girls and women travel from the various chiefdoms to the Ludzidzini Royal Village to participate in the eight-day event. The young, unmarried girls were placed in female age-regiments; girls who had fallen pregnant outside wedlock had their families fined a cow.

Umhlanga was created in the 1940s Eswatini under the rule of Sobhuza II, and is an adaptation of the much older Umchwasho ceremony. The reed dance continues to be practised today in Eswatini. In South Africa, the reed dance was introduced in 1991 by Goodwill Zwelithini, the former King of the Zulus. The dance in South Africa takes place in Nongoma, a royal kraal of the Zulu king.

The reed dance videos were once classified as age-restricted content by YouTube, which angered the users who had uploaded them. This included Lazi Dlamini, the head of TV Yabantu, an online video production company that aims to produce content that “protects, preserves and restores African values”. Working with more than 200 cultural groupings across the country and in neighbouring Eswatini, Dlamini organised a series of protests against Google to force them to rethink their position. YouTube apologized, and allowed the showing of bonafide African traditional videos. According to a representative for the company, they lifted the restriction, as it is not Google's policy to "restrict nudity in such instances where it is culturally or traditionally appropriate