“My heart was pained again because they grew sugar cane on top of my first born son’s grave… we found bones of our dead in the open,” says 50-year-old Carol as she sits in her dusty make-shift hut in Simunye in Swaziland. A combination of red mud, branches and whatever she can scavenge to hold it all together, her house still looks too weak to protect her against the brutal winter winds that slice through the Lebombo Mountain Range.

To anyone visiting this isolated community of once prosperous farmers, this starkness may seem strange after driving through endless fields of lush sugar cane marked with the insignia of the King’s Royal Swaziland Sugar Corporation (RSSC). Carol’s community was among the first of various rural communities in the region forcibly relocated from their homelands in the 1970s to make way for sugar cane production, the crop that has become known as “the hunger crop” because of the poverty left in its wake among evicted communities.

As we visit Carol, meanwhile, on the other side of the country, King Mswati III—with an entourage of selected wives and a bevy of royal hands—boards his recently refurbished A340-300 Airbus purchased for US$30 million. He is on his way to New York for his annual address to the United Nations General Assembly, but is reportedly flying a few days earlier to squeeze in some shopping and business.

That Swaziland is also home to some of the biggest multinational companies in the region, which makes a killing off of cosy relationships with a regime notorious for paying little heed to human or property rights (by Western or even traditional definition)—a kingdom described by a local critic as a bizarre place of “traditional leather sandals and BMWs”—goes unnoticed by most.

Swaziland was colonized by Britain, and the former Empire’s financial interests in the country go back long before they granted Swaziland independence in 1968. Britain built strong relationships with the current King’s father, Sobhuza II. This was no different for various multinational companies who saw great opportunities in the natural resource-rich Kingdom decades back, largely underexploited by traditional structures in the country.

For regular poverty-stricken Swazis like Carol who got caught up in the political and business ambitions of the Royal family and multinationals, there would be no respite. Her story is a common one in the many isolated rural areas of the region and just a precursor for further evictions that took place in a community not far away – again, to the benefit of the King.

Swaziland attracts foreigners for its natural beauty, towns and villages nestled between endless rolling hills and mountains, as well as some of its cultural spectacles. The Reed Dance ceremony—where as many as up to 40,000 young Swazi maidens cut reeds in front of the king and Queen Mother as a rite of passage to womanhood—attracts tens of thousands of international tourists every year. During the ritual, the king may, should he so choose, pick a bride to join his 15 current wives. This spectacle is an easy sell for Swazi tourism as an opportunity for foreigners to see one “of the biggest and most spectacular cultural events in Africa.”