RUDOLPH MAZIYA HAS BEEN INVOLVED in the fight against HIV since the mid-’90s, when he worked for the Swaziland National AIDS/STI Programme. I spoke with him at his office in Manzini in 2013, and he told me that there was another major reason that HIV was able to take such a hold of Swaziland. At the very basic level, he said, Swazis see disease in a different way.

“The idea of germs, the idea of microorganisms, is not part of our belief system. Our sociology has more of the abstract, spiritual kind of explanation for diseases,” he told me. “So when we came in and started talking to people about something that was being passed on from one person to another, it seemed unbelievable.”

Swazis did not see HIV as the real killer. Rather than germs, they saw revenge. Rather than a virus, they saw muti. “When people were starting to get sick, some people would think that they’ve been bewitched, and not that there’s a virus destroying their immune system,” Maziya said. So in the many deaths that followed David’s arrest, they perceived that David had the advantage of witchcraft, and possibly influential people paying for that witchcraft. Otherwise, what was killing all these people involved with the trial?

Even today people are scared to talk about the case, not wanting to be the next victim. A relative of a prominent member of the court who died during the investigation told me, “I’m scared of talking about this. All the people that were in touch with this matter are dead.” A man who lived in the Malkerns area, where I was looking for potential witnesses to interview, told me, “The people here, they may know something, but they won’t say anything. They don’t want to get involved. Even if they saw something, they won’t tell you.”

It didn’t help that toward the end of the trial, the chief prosecutor publicly announced that 50 percent of the witnesses in the case had died. While that number was likely an exaggeration, the many people who have died have contributed to the belief that David is favored by a higher power. One woman I spoke with before the trial ended told me, “When he gets out he’s gonna kill everybody….This is Swaziland; he’s gonna come back.”

But when I look again at what’s occurred in the fourteen years since David was arrested, sixteen since he began killing, these views seem less primitive naivete and more the beliefs of a slightly paranoid and sick population, closely watching a trial that paralleled the timeline of HIV. What people thought was conspiracy, and muti, was really just the combination of HIV and time. When life expectancy is half as long, time moves twice as fast, and people die.

“THE NATION CANNOT STAND BY and watch as the virus kills our country,” King Mswati III declared in his memorable speech of 1999. But by then, HIV had spread so deeply into Swazi society that its effects had hit everyone in the country. And since the king is the lifeblood of the nation, it is appropriate that his reign began in 1986, the same year HIV arrived. He was only eighteen years old at the time, and he had a lot to live up to.

Mswati III’s father, King Sobhuza II, had been the longest reigning world leader at the time of his death in 1982. He had ruled Swaziland for more than sixty years, taking it from an unstable group of clans getting tossed around by colonial powers to a modern, independent nation in 1968. He was generally a man of his people. He was also an educated man. One elderly Swazi I spoke with told me that Swaziland is what it is because of Sobhuza. “He shaped Swaziland. He said you shouldn’t give up Swazi traditions, but also should not shy away from the Western. And Swazis have done that.”

Indeed by most accounts, Sobhuza II was a strong and clever king. Historian Alan R. Booth wrote that “in an age when kings everywhere came toppling down, Sobhuza not only endured but reigned supreme — not so much by the force of arms or money as by the genuine love of his people. His skills as a politician, a diplomat, an entrepreneur, and a humanitarian are already legendary.” At the same time, Sobhuza II made sure that the royal family maintained and grew its power during his reign, keeping the money flowing to his relatives and the absolute monarchy in place — until it was the last one left in Africa.

King Mswati III (center) /Ravi Baji

Mswati III had to live up to his father’s memory, which was difficult. What’s more, his right to the throne was questioned from the start, according to Booth, because his mother, now the queen mother, had been rumored to have got her start as a housemaid. He was constantly in fear of assassination.

Part of the invaluable trove released in 2010 by WikiLeaks included cables from the U.S. Ambassador to Swaziland. The cables summarized private conversations with a former king’s advisor, who indicated that Mswati III is “essentially a bastard outsider to the royal family.” The informant said Mswati III “is not a reader, and will not review documents left for him.” He called the king “not intellectually well-developed,” in contrast to his father.

Now forty-six, Mswati III has grown into a controversial monarch. He has had fifteen wives, although three have left him, another was accused of poisoning him, and a fifth was caught having an affair with the justice minister. None of these embarrassments were reported in Swazi newspapers. He does nothing to discourage polygamy, which has come to endanger his people.

Royal family trips to Vegas, exorbitant shopping sprees for his wives and more than twenty children, the purchase of a $500,000 Maybach luxury car, and a recent “gift” of a private jet have brought the leader of this country, where running water is a luxury for most citizens, much mockery in the foreign press. A report by Freedom House declared that Swazis’ “desperate circumstances” and horrid rankings on health, economy, and life indicators were underlined by “the king’s overwhelming and unchecked corruption of government power.”

The king has crushed pro-democracy movements. He encourages monopolies, stifles communication and commerce, and takes a cut of foreign investment and business — money that is supposedly in trust for the nation. Even with a high GDP per capita by sub-Saharan standards, the majority of the country lives in abject poverty. In other words, most Swazis do not benefit from the hundreds of millions, if not billions, of emalangeni that are funneled through their king.

But he was the king the country had in 1999, and Swazis generally respect, or at least fear, their monarch despite his flaws. “The king embodies the vitality of the nation,” wrote Booth. “His medicines and powers protect his people from danger and provide for their well-being. His rainmaking powers bring them prosperity. The strength and virility of the king therefore command the constant attention of the nation.”

If the king’s vitality reflects that of the nation, then what happens when the king falls ill, and what does it say about his health when the entire country is affected by HIV? At the peak of AIDS, and the peak of David’s murders, in April 2001, King Mswati III got sick with an “undisclosed illness.” His birthday, a national holiday, was approaching, but it was announced in the newspaper that for “the first time in the history of such celebrations…they have been postponed.” A month earlier, one of his wives, known as Inkhosikati LaMagwaza, had spent five days in the Mbabane Clinic with the same “undisclosed illness,” one of the many euphemisms for AIDS used in Swaziland. The same queen later ran away from Swaziland after being sick for two years. After weeks of speculation, it was announced in the papers that the king’s mystery illness was only gastritis.

In a society with a high HIV prevalence, it can be deadly to change sexual partners within a short period of time, to have what is called “multiple concurrent partners.” During the first month after contracting HIV, you are highly infectious, and yet often unaware of the virus’s presence. If you have sex with more than one person in the span of days or weeks, common in Swaziland among polygamists and others, then you are not only doubly or triply exposed yourself, but are also exposing all the people in your “sexual network” to the possibility of HIV infection. All the people you are having sex with, plus all the people they are having sex with, are at risk.

As for the king, who had first been married as a teenager, before HIV was even a known entity in Swaziland, by 2001 he had eight wives, a large sexual network by almost any standards. In a society where HIV meant death, as it did when the king got sick, polygamy was a tradition worth celebrating only as a historical artifact. If Mswati III is HIV positive, and it is of course only speculation, he has not told his people. Meanwhile, leadership by example in the kingdom has been sorely lacking.

In early 2001, Swaziland was suffering from the worst HIV crisis ever seen in any country, the “vitality of the nation” was deeply reduced, a murderer was stealing women from their families, and a once-promising nation was seeing all its economic progress reversing.

The mother of one of David’s victims put Swaziland’s hard times in perspective: “I don’t know what’s really gone wrong,” she said. “Maybe it’s the end of the world.”

Vusi Dlamini identifying Sindi’s clothes in 2001

III. David’s Partners

WHEN SINDI WENT MISSING, it seemed to then-constable Vusi Dlamini that indeed it was the end of the world. “I was depressed. I did not have a life,” Vusi told me. When weeks went by with no word of her whereabouts, he tried but failed to prepare himself for life without her. Thinking she had left him, he put away her photos and clothes, but he could not bring himself to throw them away. He contemplated suicide. “Whenever I was working, I was using a firearm,” he said. “Many times — more than ten times — I thought ‘in three seconds this misery can just…’” At this point in my conversation with Vusi, I saw, for the first and last time, a Swazi man crying.

As the search for Sindi proved futile, and Vusi became increasingly desperate, his father suggested he consult a sangoma, one of the traditional prophets of the kind that Lydia Makhubu had studied. Vusi was skeptical, but agreed. “For we Swazis, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” he said. “But you do these things, anything which could bring her back, lead me to her.” It was convincing, he told me, when the prophet said, “‘You are looking for your wife, who got lost.’” Still, Vusi knew that, as the son of a famous prince, his identity and his motive for being there would be easy for the sangoma to guess.

After giving Vusi a potion to drink, the sangoma took him to a small room with a white curtain hanging from the wall. “Then he said, ‘Just look at that curtain and don’t blink. Don’t look anywhere else,’” Vusi told me. “‘Look at the curtain. Look at the curtain.’ I started doubting. He said ‘No, don’t doubt. Look at the curtain. Look at the curtain.’” Vusi looked at the curtain for twenty to thirty minutes, until something changed. Sindi appeared.

“I could see my wife there. A picture, like a real picture, like a film, like a TV, like a video but not quite as good, but I could see that it was her.” She was in a bedroom that he didn’t recognize. She looked comfortable, like she was living there. Clothes were scattered on the bed, and she was folding them. She had wrapped a large towel across her breasts. Sindi was there with him. “I can tell you that I don’t believe in that,” Vusi said with misty eyes, as if he was again seeing his wife. While his father was the great traditionalist, his mother was a staunch Christian. “I never believed in that. I’d rather believe in God,” he said. “But that day I believed.”

The sangoma interpreted Vusi’s vision as a sign that Sindi was alive, living with another man. He said she was near a sugar-producing town in the north. Hard as the thought was, the vision gave Vusi a very temporary reprieve from the pain of not knowing. “Just for a moment, to not have that stress and depression,” he told me. “To somehow know she was staying with someone. Why was I killing myself? It meant it’s over.”

Vusi didn’t tell his family or Sindi’s about the vision on the white curtain. Not even his father. He didn’t want to depress them further. And he was glad he didn’t, because it soon came out that the sangoma was gravely mistaken. “It was false. Everything was false,” Vusi said. “Nothing like that happened.

“My wife died,” he said, “the very same day she left the house.”