"Cops seize goat meat at funeral"

That's my favourite headline in the paper so far. Apparently the goat meat had been stolen. Of course the mourners then tried to lynch the people who had sold them said stolen goat meat.

A good one this week was "Farmer sleeps in tree to scare away warthogs". I'll keep an eye out for the good ones. The South Wales Echo is positively Guardianesque compared to this.

Sadly though, most days the papers (there are two, with various degrees of government intervention) are full of stories about rapes, incest and various other sex crimes and violence. The rates of gender-based violence are so high...in the first two months of the year there were 121 reported rapes - in a tiny country. And this will just be the tip of the iceberg. It's difficult to know whether the papers are full of these stories just because of the high number of crimes, or because the Swazis love to read about it. Sad either way.

The other sad thing is that the spike in number of rapes is often attributed to the marula season. Marula is a local fruit, and one of its uses is to make alcohol - tastes a bit like the raw Calvados my brother Christopher once brought back from a farmer in Normandy - the kind of stuff that makes you go blind! People (men) then gather to drink it and every year during the season the rates of rape go up. But the King swears by its health-giving properties...