King Mswati III Has Changed the Name of Swaziland to the Kingdom of eSwatini
The declaration marks 50 years since the country gained independence from British rule.
King Mswati III announced Thursday that his country Swaziland will now be referred to its original name—eSwatini.
The announcement was made during independence day celebrations at a packed sports stadium in the city of Manzini, IOL reports. The name change also marks 50 years since independence from British rule.
King Mswati III has announced Swaziland 🇸🇿 will now be known as The Kingdom of Eswatini
eSwatini means "place of the Swazi" in the Swazi language. The country did not change its name when it gained independence in 1968 after being a British protectorate for more than 60 years.
"African countries on getting independence reverted to their ancient names before they were colonized," he said during the celebrations. "So from now on the country will be officially be known as the Kingdom of eSwatini."
Reactions on social media have been mixed—some users on Twitter laud the monarch's move, while others point out issues in the country that have yet to be addressed. Check out a few of them below.
His Majesty King Mswati III has spoken. We are no more Swaziland. We are now the Kingdom of Eswatini.!! 🙌🙌 Bayethe! #Swazitwitter #Eswatini
We talked to the South African designer who, after co-winning the LMVH Prize last year, showcased his Bodyland Autumn/Winter 22-23 collection in Paris earlier this month.
In 2015, South African designer Lukhanyo Mdingi founded his eponymous label. Inspired by his mother and grandmother who raised him, Mdingi has created a formidable brand that is centered on building a bridge between heritage and timeless fashion pieces. Since the brand’s inception, Mdingi has made great strides in fashion, from his NYFW debut in 2019 to being crowned a joint winner of the 2021 LVMH Karl Lagerfeld Prize.
This year, Mdingi took his vision of Africa to France’s fashion capital, Paris, where he made his Bodyland Autumn/Winter 22-23 debut for the Paris Fashion Week Menswear Collection. Being the first designer on the program schedule to present, Mdingi showcased a collection that spoke of the relationship he shares with himself and the artisans he collaborates with. For the past two years, Mdingi has been working to source his woven textiles and knitwear from crafts communities in Burkina Faso, Somalia, and the Eastern Cape, and the collection featured textural and sartorial nuances paying homage to his being a young Black creative.
Garments were tailored from vibrant emerald ikat cloth, which suggested a perfect mix of nuance and style. Women’s tailoring included a suit with wide, cuffed pants in an ikat pattern, combining green and yellow checks with bold blue stripes. The collection also had textured knitwear, which included fringes, ponchos and patchwork shawls, matched with fine knit polo tops and dresses in zingy shades of yellow, lilac and pink, set off with graphic color-blocks and jagged stripes.
Mdingi, who grew up in the Eastern Cape, studied fashion design at Cape Peninsula University Technology, and soon after became a name to watch, when he was named a finalist in the ELLE Rising Star Design Awards.
OkayAfrica spoke to him about his ever-evolving brand and making his debut at Paris Fashion Week.
Interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Tell us about your debut in Paris -- how did it go for you?
Incredible and very important. Haha! And I’m honestly still making sense of it all to myself. It’s clear that there’s a renaissance of young emerging Black and brown skinned creatives, and I have recognized that this was an opportunity for myself and my fellow peers like Thebe Magugu, Priya Ahluwalia, and other extraordinary designers that I respect from a distance. There’s a resurgence that what we’re doing matters in the most incredible way. It is a form of representation, understanding your place in the world, and how people would see and be inspired by your achievements and milestones you’d reach as a person of color.
What was the inspiration behind the collection?
We want to create something very modern, but most importantly, bring visibility to the [craftspeople], which will essentially lead to some sort of social impact. So, the collection just expands on something we’ve done in the past, checking on ways we can grow from it. That is the premise and foundation of the collection: how we can work with these incredible craftspeople to show the world how crafts can live within the modern society. This season just expands on our story that has started and has been a part of our brand's DNA.
In building this collection, what were the best and challenging parts?
The exciting part would definitely be our works with the collaborators. I think I live in a particular way that’s based on community and building human relationships, and for me, the best moment was seeing how we can come together. I love the human networks that are involved around the clothes, even working with them here in Paris. It was incredible.
And to be quite honest, I think the challenging parts for me were things outside of my control, so they’re not things I try to deliberately change or complicate. Some of them are usually the internal dialogue that I have with myself, how I see the business and myself, the complicated backs and forths of why I’m doing what I’m doing. These are my biggest challenges. I’m carrying it, but it’s a different kind of weight.
Taking it back to 2021, how was to be a winner of the LVMH Prize?
I mean, it’s really incredible. I think being part of the LVMH Prize really causes a lot of visibility to entrepreneurs and young designers, and the reality is that each designer uses that platform and opportunity to explore potentials. It truly is incredible to have and be a part of that history, especially because it is one of the prominent awards in the fashion industry. It was an extraordinary thing, to be able to share with so many other amazing designers. I am super grateful for that.
How would you describe your brand, Lukhanyo Mdingi?
I’ve had so much time to really reflect on this, and as I’ve gotten older with the brand in steady progress, I’ve realized that the premise of who we are comes down to human beings and human connections, and how we have expanded our work, which is very reliant on collaborative projects. This is predominantly done through crafts, more than anything else, because textiles, fabrics and designs are essentially a huge part of our label. What we’ve also realized is that crafts has become a huge part of our brand's DNA, and we are in a fortunate position to position and align ourselves with different communities in places like South Africa, Burkina Faso, Ghana, and so on.
At Lukhanyo Mdingi, we have also tried to use this design entrepreneurship as a vehicle to make social trends and social impact within these particular groups. That’s how we kind of shuffled the paradigm where our label is not necessarily about these beautiful well-made clothes, but is really just about the human beings behind the craft, and to see how we can add value to their lives through craft, designs, and textile development.
For his Bodyland collection, Lukhanyo Mdingi aimed to bring visibility to the craftspeople he worked with, in the hopes of creating social impact.Photo: La Fédération de la Haute Couture
Most times, entrepreneurs who go on the route of influencing and elevating smaller communities do this from a place of personal experience. Did you grow up as part of a smaller community? Why is doing this important for you?
I agree, and the reality is that we’ve all had our particular conditions as we grow up, and I think from my childhood, I grew up in a household filled with kids and women, and that community in itself has really shaped who I am today -- as a Black man coming from a space or group where we are constantly marginalized. I know what it’s like not to be seen or heard. I’ve experienced and felt it. I, therefore, tried to make that experience more apparent within my work, and the values that I put on the relationship I have with this community of women that are coming from the same space that I did.
And can I just say that I have never answered that before, and I just realized that it’s something I am still trying to make sense of myself, but I’ve never been so honest about how the shaping of my childhood has penetrated my life in such a way where it’s informed the way I move with work, and how I’m using my gifts as a way to channel all of the past baggage and trauma.
Appreciate you for sharing this with us. We have seen Lukhanyo Mdingi as a brand, but who is Lukhanyo as a person, outside of the brand?
I want to say that the brand is informed by my own personality. It is something that is incredibly layered, and to even give an elevated pitch of what the brand represents reflects some kind of effects of who I am. I’m direct, but also not direct; I’m complicated, but also not complicated. I like to be incredibly private. You know what I mean? If a person really, therefore, wants to understand who I am, they really just need to pay attention to the trajectory of the brand, mainly because it is informed by my own personal feelings as to how I see myself or how I see the world.
The Nigerian superstar joins forces with fellow singer CKay in her latest run at topping the charts.
Nigerian singer Ayra Starrjoins forces with fellow Nigerian crooner CKayto bring fans a passionate reminder of how complex romantic relationships can be. The 19-year singer-songwriter has finally gifted us with the accompanying visuals to power ballad 'Beggie Beggie', off of her 2021 debut album 19 & Dangerous.
The Nollywood-inspired music video, directed by Director K, is set at a house party that Starr seems frustrated to be attending. The song itself hears Starr croon lyrics like 'Now I'm alone; Now wey you no send me' and 'See the way I dey beg you. Shey bambi allah mo je ni?' -- and her reaction to seeing her supposed lover walk in with a chorus of ladies echoes the frustrating words her sultry voice projects. The Afropop songstress then takes matters into her own hands by ringing a rope around the estranged lover and burying him waist deep so that he can properly listen to the singer's grievances. We're not condoning the behavior - but we get it.
The passion-driver music video features a strong nostalgic presence as the fashion choices favor old Nollywood styles and attitudes making waves again. “Old Nollywood has had some of the biggest impact on Gen-Z fashion and style,” Starr said in a statement, of the creative choice. “I thought it would be fun and beautiful to re-create that era and its influence on pop culture as a whole. ‘Beggie Beggie’ is not just a sad song, it’s about a young woman seeing things for what they are.”
Watch Ayra Starr and CKay in the music video for Beggie Beggie here.
Nigerian-American filmmakers Adamma and Adnanne Ebo are premiering their debut feature film Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul, starring Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown at the Sundance Film Festival.
Growing up in Atlanta’s Nigerian community, the church played a big part in the lives of Adamma and Adanne Ebo. So it’s no surprise the identical twin sisters, who founded Ejime Productions (twins in Igbo) together, centered their first feature film around the subject of religion.
Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul is making its debut at the Sundance Film Festival, with Adamma as writer-director and Adanne as producer, alongside the likes of Regina Hall and Sterling K Brown, who star in the film, and Daniel Kaluuya. The film is a satire on for-profit religion, exploring a couple, played by Hall and Brown, who run a Southern Baptist megachurch trying to manage the aftermath of a scandal.
Both sisters were selected as Sundance fellows for the Episodic Lab in 2019, and Adamma was also chosen for the Sundance Screenwriting Intensive with a feature film. Based on a short film that Adamma wrote as part of her thesis while at UCLA, Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul has been picking up rave reviews and is one of the hottest titles at this year’s fest.
They both spoke to OkayAfrica about making it and how their Nigerian background influences the work they make.
Honk for Jesus. Save Your Soul tackles religion of the Southern Baptist kind, but are there any similarities with how religion plays out in Nigerian culture that you wanted it to speak to as well?
Adanne: Yeah, it's not that different. It feels extremely similar. It's very performative. It's very big. And it also has some of the not-so-great parts where people want you to abide by certain rules and not question anything as you go along the way. A lot of unchecked power.
Was that the reason why you wanted to make this film – to check that power, so to speak?
Adamma: Yeah, to encourage people to do that and not to be afraid to question things, for sure.
You made the short film, Honk For Jesus, as your thesis project, Adamma. What made you realize it would be good as a full-length feature?
I actually wrote an early draft of the feature before I even made the short and so the feature existed in a different capacity. It was a lot different before I made this short, and I decided that a short would be great as a proof of concept to this crazy movie that's doing a lot of weird stylistic things and tackling a subject matter in a way that, and with a tone that, people really aren't expecting or aren't used to it; with characters people aren't super familiar with, largely. So the feature came, and then the short, and then many, many more drafts of the feature!
Regina Hall and Sterling K. Brown star in the film, Honk For Jesus. Save Your Soul, made by Adamma and Adanne Ebo, which is currently playing at the Sundance Film Festival.
Photo: Sundance Film Festival
As you mention, the film straddles a few genres, it’s a mockumentary, and there are elements of drama and comedy – how did you work on getting the tone right?
Adamma: It felt pretty natural. It's the type of media that I like – things that run the total gambit and that take risks, totally, and finding the humor in or around things that aren't ordinarily funny. I just made sure that whenever we were doing something comedic, to make sure that there were instances of darkness, and whenever we were approaching something darker, making sure that there was a bookend of comedy that doesn't necessarily relate to the subject, but just lightens things just a little bit, and make sure that it flows in and out.
As twins who work together, what’s your relationship like? Do you get on the same wavelength pretty easily? Do you think of things together?
Adanne: Yeah, it feels as similar as our regular relationship. Because we were born a partnership and we don't have any other siblings. So this is really the only sibling dynamic that we know. And it just feels more natural to do things together than not. So working together feels seamless. It almost doesn't feel like I'm working with another person.
Adamma: It just feels like an extension.
Getting Sterling K. Brown and Regina Hall for one's first feature film is quite a feat. What did they bring to the production?
Adamma: Immense skill and and really ready to do the work and to be scrappy on this like super low-budget independent film. They bought this feeling of nurturing, that they were really, really invested in me, as a Black woman, writing and directing my first feature, doing it in the middle of a pandemic. They were just incredibly nurturing and really there, on a familial level almost, like, they felt like family and really, really wanted me to succeed and did everything they could to help me succeed.
Adanne: And they're also producers on the film. Yeah, were they, you know, they watched cuts and gave notes on various cuts. They were really integral in helping to shape what became what y'all saw on screen.
Your production company is called Ejime -- how much does your Nigerian heritage inform who you are while you’re working and living in Atlanta and LA?
Adanne: I think it influences how and what we create…
Adamma: And how we say things – our voice. How we write and present ourselves and present our work as filmmakers. Nigerians are special people.
Adanne: They’re saucy.
Adamma: They’re saucy! The way that they communicate is…
Adanne: It’s sharp. It’s biting.
Adamma: Yes! And that's probably a big part of why we're attracted to the type of film and filmmaking that we are, is because of that. Conversations with our father and our grandfather and our grandmother, his siblings, our whole extended family, if you're an outsider looking in, it can seem like a heated argument, but we're kind of just talking or having fun.
Adane: Like a sport.
Adamma: But we like that biting nature, heavy critique – Nigerians will critique you, they’re not shy with that. and I thought they were very critical. They're not shy with that. Probably a lot of why we're attracted to that type of voice is because of our Nigerian background.
You have a lot coming up in terms of film and TV projects, setting yourselves up as a dynamic duo in Hollywood – what are you most excited about?
Adamma: We have our next feature film lined up and so we're gonna put that one together. We wrote that one together, and so we're definitely excited to put that out into the world. Then we have a couple of television shows in development that we are also excited to put out into the world. So we're working. We like being creative. This is fun!
Ugandan courts set Kakwenza Rukirabashaija free on bail this week before unidentified security forces "picked him up". His whereabouts are currently unknown.
For his Bodyland collection, Lukhanyo Mdingi aimed to bring visibility to the craftspeople he worked with, in the hopes of creating social impact.Photo: La Fédération de la Haute Couture
