Ezulwini – The United States Embassy in Eswatini held its Independence Day reception on Thursday, bringing together senior government officials, diplomats and guests to mark 250 years since the signing of the American Declaration of Independence.
Chargé d’Affaires Weinstock addressed the gathering, which was attended by the King’s Representative, Prince Guduza and other dignitaries, reflecting on the milestone anniversary and the enduring ties between the two countries.
“On July 4th, the United States will mark 250 years since fifty-six people, a group of ordinary farmers, lawyers, philosophers, and patriots, took up their quills to sign their names to a single sheet of parchment: the Declaration of Independence,” Weinstock said. 
This year’s national celebration carries the theme Freedom 250, which calls on Americans to look back with pride at what 250 years of independence has produced, to look around with gratitude at the friendships built along the way, and to look forward with the same ambition that carried the original signers into an uncertain future.
Weinstock traced a line of American invention that shaped the modern world, from Eli Whitney’s concept of interchangeable parts that laid the foundation for mass production, to Alexander Graham Bell’s first telephone call in 1876, to Thomas Edison’s perfection of the incandescent light bulb in 1879. He recalled the Wright brothers’ first powered flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in December 1903, and the moon landing 66 years later in 1969.
“Edison once said that genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration. That is the American formula,” Weinstock told guests.
He noted that American researchers pioneered the mass production of penicillin during the Second World War, that Bell Labs scientists invented the transistor in 1947, and that the internet began as a US government research project in the late 1960s connecting a handful of university computers.
Turning to the bilateral relationship, Weinstock said the friendship between the United States and Eswatini stretched back to the Kingdom’s independence in 1968, and was visible in clinics, classrooms, farms and businesses across the country.
He pointed to Eswatini being among the first countries in the world to receive lenacapavir, an American-made HIV prevention drug requiring only two injections per year and showing nearly 100 percent efficacy. Last December, the two governments signed a new bilateral health agreement under which the United States will provide $205 million over five years, making Eswatini one of the highest per-capita beneficiaries of such support on the continent.
The Peace Corps this year also celebrated 50 years of American volunteers working alongside Emaswati in schools, clinics and communities. Programmes including the International Visitor Leadership Program, Fulbright, the Young African Leaders Initiative and the Pan-African Youth Leadership Program have over the decades connected citizens of both countries.
Weinstock closed by expressing confidence in the future of the relationship. “As we look ahead to the next 250 years, we do so with confidence, confidence in the power of human creativity, in the strength of friendship between nations, and in the enduring truth that freedom, when protected and nurtured, produces excellence,” he said.
