Umhlanga

Umhlanga [um̩ɬaːŋɡa], or Reed Dance ceremony, is an annual Swazi event that takes place at the end of August or at the beginning of September. In Eswatini, tens of thousands of unmarried and childless Swazi girls and women travel from the various chiefdoms to the Ludzidzini Royal Village to participate in the eight-day event. Today’s Reed Dance is a revival of the older “umcwasho” custom. Under that practice, unmarried girls were grouped into age-regiments. If a woman had become pregnant outside marriage, her family paid a cow to the local chief.¶

The text above is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Umhlanga (ceremony)”, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 licence.¶

Umhlanga is ceremony, according to the structured record cited below. This entry was generated automatically from that record and has not yet been reviewed by a person familiar with the tradition.¹¶

The source record links this tradition to 2 external registers, which can be verified through the citation.¹¶