Umhlanga (Reed Dance)

Tens of thousands of bare-breasted, childless national flowers (a.k.a. unmarried virgins) participate in this eight-day ceremony honouring womanhood and chastity. The girls gather and tie reeds into bundles that they lay before the Queen Mother as an offering of respect before dancing in short, beaded skirts to celebrate their virginity. They also wore tassels as signs of chastity following a 2001 royal ban on girls having sex before the age of eighteen (an hiv-prevention measure in a country where two in five adults are living with the virus). But last year King Mswati iii, sub-Saharan Africas last absolute monarch, lifted the ban several weeks before choosing a seventeen-year-old national flower from the dance to be his thirteenth wife.

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