Thousands of warriors in leopard skin loincloths, carrying spears and cowhide shields, entered a stadium nestling in Ezulwini, the Valley of Heaven and the royal heartland of Africa's last absolute monarchy.
Tens of thousands of maidens followed them. They had gathered last week for the annual reed dance, parading topless as a symbol of purity before king Mswati III, in the hope they would be picked out to add to his 13 existing wives.
A 300-strong honour guard from the Umbutfo Swaziland Defence Force, wearing guards-style red jackets, marched in to the tune of Colonel Bogey. The queen mother, or Indlovukazi - Great She-Elephant - preceded the arrival of the monarch.
But one of the loudest cheers was reserved for Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwean leader, one of nine heads of state and government present, reaffirming his status as an African elder statesman.
Mr Mugabe took advantage of the opportunity to seize the hand of Ian Khama, Botswana's new president, who regards him as illegitimate and boycotted a regional summit last month in protest at his presence. Mr Khama had no option but to shake it.
Clad in leopard skin himself, King Mswati was paraded around the stadium, waving to cheering crowds from an open-topped BMW X5, number plate HMSD 12, for His Majesty of Swaziland.
The occasion also marked his 40th birthday and in a direct echo of the commemoration of the Queen's official birthday in London, the honour guard trooped their colour in precision formation, to a medley including Happy Birthday, Auld Lang Syne, and Greensleeves - albeit with a row of bare-breasted princesses watching from the stands.
Pointing out that he was only four months old at independence, the king said: "I was also happy since I was in the warm hands of a happy mother on that historic day.
"I am aware that the world might be wondering as to why we are so excited in celebrating 40 years of our independence. The answer is simple, we are celebrating our nationhood and also thanking God almighty for preserving us as a nation. We are celebrating the unity, peace, stability and progress that we have enjoyed for the past 40 years."
But the "40/40" celebrations, as they have been dubbed, have provoked unprecedented anger among some Swazis at their cost, officially f1.5 million but widely believed to be far higher - 20 BMW 750 cars have been bought for the occasion, in one of Africa's poorest countries.
King Mswati admitted that Swaziland faced "multiple challenges which includes poverty, hunger, persistent drought, unemployment, chronic diseases like the HIV and Aids epidemic and tuberculosis".
But he promised to make the kingdom "a better place for all".
Waiting for the festivities to start, Zodwa Mabuza, 37, who works for the Swaziland chamber of commerce, said: "I'm happy that we have gone this far as a nation without having gone though a war. We should be happy but at the back of our minds we should be aware that we have some challenges that we need to overcome.
"It shouldn't be too expensive," she added. "We need to allocate our resources where there is the most need but we have reason to celebrate."
Julius Dlamini, 54, who when he is not dressed as a warrior works as a salesman in Manzini, had no doubts. "I was here in this stadium when we got independence," he said. "I'm feeling very, very happy today.
"There are a few who are against him," he said of his king, "but they are people who can't be in the same country."
The new data came as senior officials from the G20 nations met in Rome, where
Bruno le Maire, France's agriculture minister, said the famine was set to
become "the scandal of the century" if action was not taken.
Almost 800,000 children in Somalia are now "acutely malnourished"
and in need of special feeding - an increase of 40 per cent. 82 per cent of
them are in the country's south, which is largely cut off from aid
deliveries.
The number of people needing help has increased by one million since January,
and is 85 per cent higher than at the same time last year, Unicef said.
Afshan Khan, a Unicef director, told the Rome conference that the response to
the current crisis must be "flexible".
"We must apply a range of modalities in different circumstances and
adapting our response to local conditions and needs," he said.
Unicef is one of the few agencies so far able to bring supplies into
Islamist-held areas of southern Somalia, and Mr Khan's statement was seen as
an indication that arrangements were on the table to increase such
deliveries.
No new aid pledges came from the meeting, held by the United Nation's Food and
Agriculture Organisation. But politicians welcomed an announcement of f310m
in fresh World Bank funds to help fight the current drought and prepare
those already affected to cope with future dry spells.
"The recurring nature of drought and growing risk it poses to social and
economic gains in this region calls not only for immediate relief from the
current situation, but also for building long term drought resilience,"
said Obiageli Ezekwesili, the World Bank's vice president for Africa.
Promises of help to safeguard the future were welcome but too late, said
Barbara Stocking, the head of Oxfam.
"This meeting was a first step," she said. "But the fact that
we are here again, three years after the world said never again to famine,
shows that strong action is required as well as strong words.
"Often it feels as if the donor community is prepared to be very generous
when it comes to this crisis but is simply not prepared to commit to the
longer term."
Another meeting will be held in Nairobi, Kenya's capital, on Wednesday, when
fresh promises are expected to fund programmes to save up to 11.5 million
people in the Horn of Africa.
Among the worst affected are seeking help in Mogadishu, Somalia's wrecked
capital, where the internationally-backed administration is struggling with
an influx of more than 1,000 people a day.
They are camping between bombed-out buildings in the city, in the few areas
controlled by the government.
But there are concerns that an expected military push against al-Shabaab, the
pro-al-Qaeda Islamists ruling the rest of the city, could trigger a second
crisis.
Sources confirmed a fresh offensive next month that is aimed at wrenching back
control of the city from the insurgency.
"That is definitely complicated by the internally displaced people now
flooding into the city," said one adviser to the Somali government.
Batulo Abukar 29, told The Daily Telegraph in Mogadishu that three of her
children died as she fled Bakool, one of the two Somali famine zones, for
Mogadishu.
She was also pregnant and lost that baby on her walk to safety.
"It is very painful, I am laying here now, I delivered a dead baby and
all the other three died on the road," Mrs Abukar said.
"We left about six elderly people under tree waiting their death because
they couldn't walk and no one would help them."
Additional reporting by Abukar Albadri in Mogadishu.
Access to information technologies can play a critical role in helping people hold governments and development agencies accountable. Photograph: Lionel Cironneau/AP
Digital technologies, such as mobile phones and the internet, provide the development sector with new opportunities to plan and co-ordinate activities, expose hidden truths, and mobilise and engage new audiences. But it's not all good news: new technologies introduce plenty of risks as well.
Recent posts on the Global development site reveal there remain mixed ideas about what we mean by "development". Eric Gutierrez, Christian Aid's senior adviser on governance, argued recently that corruption is bad for business and thus bad for the economy and, ultimately, bad for development as well. Earlier, Mark Tran argued in a provocative post that, given the examples of nations which have been lifted out of poverty by corrupt or repressive regimes, suggests that, although we might not like to admit it, good governance, government accountability and uncorrupt rule are not necessarily prerequisites to development.
If you believe an over-arching ambition of development should be to ensure the benefits of progress and plenty are shared fairly among citizens, then you will likely agree it's important to have a government willing to create policies that attempt to remedy existing inequities. To do this in a democratic way, these policies, and the practices to implement them, need to be transparent to ensure people can assess how government and development money is being spent, where it is being distributed and if it achieves what was intended.
Access to information technologies – such as mobile phones, the internet, social networking sites and video – can play a critical role in helping people hold governments and development agencies accountable. When used to collect, monitor and assess information about needs, spending, activities and impacts, technologies support not only accountability but also – by allowing people to participate in their own governance – freedom of expression and civic participation.
The problem is that while new communication technologies have become cheaper and easier to use, they have also become more opaque. There are concerns about who owns data when it's uploaded on or created using a commercial service; there is confusion about default privacy settings; and there is the issue of whether individuals are able to control traces of sensitive information they or others leave behind.
As a recent special edition of the Wall Street Journal – entitled What They Know – revealed, there are many "invisible" layers that track what we do online. One very popular website was found to install hundreds of tracking files on to the hardware of anyone visiting it and many of these files were shared across companies, without the knowledge of the website user.
The security and privacy of technologies, applications and online services have implications for us all, but is particularly pertinent for people who use technologies to uncover fraud, corruption and development malpractice. Not all governments and development actors are willing to accept their actions being questioned and wrongdoings exposed. The risks people face in doing this range from censorship of their voices and their content to physical threats.
Such risks are familiar to anti-corruption and transparency advocates around the world. In the Indian state of Gujarat, activists have been using the 2005 Right to Information Act to expose the state government's corruption, mining scams and mismanagement of funds and resources. India Today magazine reports that last year saw 28 incidents of harassment and violence against citizens who lodged right to information applications, including 10 murders.
The UN Human Rights Council found that the "Tokyo Two", who uncovered corruption in the Japanese whaling programme, were harassed and abused by authorities. Or consider the work of independent news publications such as Irrawaddy, which report on the corrupt practices and atrocities of Burma's military-backed regime. The Committee to Protect Journalists recently reported that they are constantly fending off attacks that shut down their website and choke news distribution.
While there are many ways we can protect sensitive information, there is no magic bullet. Simple technical options available for digital security range from substituting https for http when accessing websites (this adds a layer of encryption), to using a programme that generates very hard-to-break passwords. More complex options include using encryption software and customising settings on tools and services. There are also old-fashioned techniques like using codes to communicate and store information.
The difficulty is developing a workable strategy for digital privacy and security. For those exposing rights abuses and corruption, this strategy needs to be tempered with a need for a public identity and privacy. Some information needs to be widely circulated; some needs to be fiercely protected.
The ways we can address these dual needs depends on a future still unwritten, in terms of how governments and commercial companies will be legally permitted to configure new technologies and use information about us. Much needs to be done if UN charters or government policies are to play a role in supporting citizens to effectively and safely use digital technologies to expose wrongdoings.
Meanwhile, we should all be thinking about what kind of digital future we want and what risks we might be taking or asking others to take when we promote digital technologies as tools for transparent, fair and just development.
• Dr Tanya Notley is a researcher at Tactical Technology Collective, which supports rights advocates to use information, communications and digital technologies to maximise the impact of their work and has produced a series of animations to raise awareness about digital privacy and security risks
One of the largest crowds to fill the square since the popular uprising that ousted President Hosni Mubarak in February was dominated by demands for Islamic sharia law.
Instead of "Peaceful, peaceful," which demonstrators have chanted during confrontations with security forces, they repeated "Islamic, Islamic."
A chant "The people want to topple the regime" was replaced by "The people want to implement Sharia," the strict form of Islamic law.
The decision by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's best organized political force, and other Islamist groups to participate significantly boosted the turnout. There has been a growing rift between the Islamic movement and liberals.
One user of social networking site Twitter, @mfatta7, signalled his uphappiness at the development. " The radical Islamist discourse in #Tahrir now is fundamentally anti-secular and neglecting any revolutionary demands," he wrote.
Dadaab's Ifo II camp will provide additional shelter for the ever-increasing number of refugees fleeing drought and conflict in Somalia. Photograph: Rebecca Blackwell/AP
The Kenyan government has announced it will open a fourth refugee camp at Dadaab to accommodate the thousands of people fleeing drought and conflict in Somalia.
According to reports on Thursday, Kenya's prime minister, Raila Odinga, who visited Dadaab this week, said Ifo II camp would be opened on humanitarian grounds.
The UN high commissioner for refugees, Antonio Guterres, has written to both Odinga and Mwai Kibaki, the president of Kenya, applauding the decision and promising the agency's full support.
Since Dadaab opened in 1991 to accommodate refugees escaping civil war in Somalia, a steady stream of people have been arriving there. However, severe food shortages and continued violence in Somalia have resulted in a dramatic increase in numbers since the beginning of the year, putting additional strain on already beleaguered resources. Dadaab, one of the world's largest, most congested refugee camps, was declared full in 2008, but the UN refugee agency, the UNHCR, said about 1,300 Somali refugees had recently been arriving daily. Up to five families are sharing plots designed for one family. Thousands of people are currently living in makeshift shelter outside the complex.
NGOs have been pressing the Kenyan government to open the extension camp, which is expected to be operational within the next 10 days.
The UNHCR said on Friday it expected its first delivery of tents for the new camp to arrive in Nairobi on Sunday. Six subsequent flights carrying equipment are expected over the next two weeks.
According to the UN, as of Wednesday the total number of refugees in and around Dadaab was 380,000, including 59,000 new arrivals living on the outskirts of the three existing camps, Ifo, Hagadera and Dagahaley.
A UNHCR official at Dadaab, Fafa Attidzah, told AP the agency was "thankful" Ifo II has been given the go-ahead to open. "We are just happy and again we are thankful and we are grateful to the Kenyan government and to the Kenyan people for having allowed these refugees who are suffering to have a little bit of dignity by having somewhere where they could be accommodated," Attidzah reportedly said.
The NGO Médecins Sans Frontières, which has been working in Dadaab for 14 years, reported this week that extreme heat, lack of water and sanitation, delays in the registration of new arrivals and provision of food rations had resulted in difficult living conditions for new arrivals. There are particular concerns over the number of children suffering from malnutrition.
MSF said on Thursday that last month's three-day rapid nutritional assessment, during which 500 children between the ages of six months and five years were measured and weighed, found 37% were suffering from global acute malnutrition; of these, 17% were severely affected, with a high risk of death. Children up to the age of 10 were also showing elevated rates of malnutrition.
"There is a high level of malnutrition. We are extremely concerned," said Monica Rull, head of MSF projects in Kenya and Somalia.
"I expected to find a difficult situation but not a catastrophic one," explained Anita Sackl, the co-ordinator of the nutritional assessment. "The majority of new arrivals actually fled because they had nothing to eat, not just because their country has been at war for decades," she added.
Thousands of Somali refugees have also been crossing the border into Ethiopia and Djibouti. As of 30 June, more than 54,000 refugees had arrived in the Dolo Ado region of Ethiopia since the beginning of the year, bringing the total number of Somali refugees in Ethiopia to more than 135,000. A third refugee camp was opened in Dolo Ado last month.
The UN estimates that at least 10 million people in east Africa will be in need of humanitarian assistance as a result of severe food shortages, failed harvest, rising food prices and conflict in the region. The UN and the UK's Disasters Emergency Committee have launched appeals for funds to address the crisis.
On Thursday, Kenya's government pledged 9bn Kenyan shillings ($100m) to provide supplies to those hit by the drought.
