People & Culture

Eswatini fits inside a single afternoon's drive and holds four separate worlds in doing it. Landlocked between South Africa on three sides and Mozambique's border to the northeast, the country runs through four belts, the Highveld, the Middleveld, the Lowveld and the Lubombo escarpment, laid roughly parallel from west to east. The Highveld, home to the capital Mbabane, climbs into granite and quartzite mountains reaching past 1,800 metres at Emlembe, the country's highest point. The Middleveld drops to gentler country with the best soils and the densest population. The Lowveld spreads into thornveld and grassland under a hotter and drier sky, and the Lubombo, smallest of the four, forms a narrow mountain wall along the Mozambique frontier. A visitor can breakfast in mountain cold and eat dinner in bushveld heat without crossing a border, a compression that shapes where the game reserves sit and where the cane fields grow. That geography also sits alongside some of the oldest evidence of modern humans anywhere on the planet. On the South African side of the Lebombo range, close to where the escarpment crosses into Eswatini, Border Cave has yielded a continuous archaeological record running from roughly 227,000 to 24,000 years ago, including the skeletal remains of eight anatomically modern humans and evidence, dated to as early as 170,000 years ago, of people systematically roasting large land snails. Just inside Eswatini itself, at Ngwenya in the northwest, Lion Cavern holds a still older claim. Radiocarbon work originally dated the oldest mining activity there to between 41,000 and 43,000 years, and archaeologists working with the German Archaeological Institute have since pushed that further, arguing on the basis of luminescence dating that intensive continuous ochre extraction began at least 48,000 years ago, which would make Lion Cavern the oldest known mine on earth. What was mined was haematite and specular haematite, red and glittering ochre pulled from the mountain for cosmetics and ritual use long before agriculture, writing, or the idea of a kingdom existed anywhere. The two sites, one just across the modern border and one just inside it, sit within the same hills and the same deep human story, tens of thousands of years before anyone called this land Eswatini. The kingdom's own history is much younger, though still old by any standard. The Swazi royal house descends from Nguni-speaking peoples who migrated south from the Great Lakes region over centuries. The Dlamini clan broke away from the main Nguni migration under a chief remembered as Ngwane, moving into the Pongola River area before pushing into what is now southern Eswatini. Sources differ slightly on dates, with one placing Ngwane III's reign from 1745 to 1780 and another describing him consolidating the nucleus of the Swazi nation around 1770 after settling Shiselweni in the far south, though both agree he is remembered as the effective founder of the nation that would later take its name from a different and later king. His successor Ndvungunye extended Dlamini influence further, and it was Ndvungunye's son, Sobhuza I, born in 1795 and crowned in 1815, who gave the kingdom its lasting shape. Pushed north by the Ndwandwe, Sobhuza I settled in the Ezulwini Valley, still the ceremonial and political heart of the country, and from there subdued or absorbed neighbouring Sotho and Nguni clans while extending Swazi authority as far as Lydenburg. He is also credited with a diplomatic feat rarer than any military one, steering his young kingdom around the worst of the mfecane, the wars of dispersal driven by the rise of Shaka's Zulu kingdom, largely through negotiation. Sources give his death as either 1836 or 1839, and he was succeeded by his son Mswati. Mswati, later Mswati II, was proclaimed king around the age of sixteen but began ruling in earnest after his circumcision in 1845, and it is from him, not from any later ruler, that the country and its people take their name, the Swati meaning the people of Mswati and eSwatini meaning the land of Mswati. Described by one biographer as the greatest of the Swazi fighting kings, he pushed the kingdom's borders north into territory now part of Zimbabwe and expanded its hold over the Lowveld, planting military outposts and royal villages that brought a diverse patchwork of clans under a single crown. His death in 1868 marked the end of Swazi expansion, and almost everything after was defensive. What followed was a slow dismemberment carried out with paper rather than with spears. Gold found in the northwest in 1875 drew a rush of European prospectors, and the king who inherited the throne after Mswati's death, Mbandzeni, granted a bewildering succession of overlapping concessions for mining, grazing, trade and administration to British and Transvaal Boer settlers, reportedly signing many with a mark because he could not read the documents himself. By the time Mbandzeni died in 1889, at thirty-three or thirty-four, virtually the entire country had been mapped and signed away several times over to competing claimants, which left the Swazi crown almost no independent authority over its own land. A convention in 1894 placed Swaziland under the Transvaal Republic, and after Britain's victory in the Anglo-Boer War an order in council in 1903 transferred control to the British, with full administration passing from the Transvaal to the British High Commissioner for South Africa by 1906. In 1907 the British tried to settle the tangle of rival concessions with a partition proclamation, which converted each disputed concession into freehold and split the land, holding one third in reserve for exclusive Swazi occupation and confirming the remaining two thirds to the concessionaires, overwhelmingly white settlers. It formalised dispossession rather than reversing it. The man who spent his life reversing it was Sobhuza II, proclaimed king at four months old in 1899, who went on to reign for roughly eighty-three years, a span among the longest documented reigns of any monarch in recorded history. In 1922 he travelled to London with a Swazi delegation to petition King George V directly for the return of partitioned land, and though the petition was refused, Sobhuza kept at it for over a decade, and land already in white hands was gradually reacquired, mostly through purchase, and restored to Swazi occupation, a campaign that took the better part of his reign. That patient recovery of land ran alongside the political process that ended British rule, and Swaziland regained full sovereignty as an independent kingdom on 6 September 1968. Independence did not settle how the kingdom would be governed. On 12 April 1973 Sobhuza II issued a royal decree repealing the constitution of 1968 outright, dissolving parliament and banning political parties and trade union activity, declaring that he was assuming all legislative, executive and judicial power in his own person and that the Westminster system was incompatible with Swazi tradition. A tinkhundla system of local constituencies, in which candidates stand as individuals rather than on party platforms and ultimate authority remains with the king, replaced multiparty politics from 1978 onward, and the proclamation of 1973 has never been repealed. Sobhuza II died in 1982 and was succeeded, after a regency, by his son Mswati III, crowned in 1986 at eighteen, who continues to rule as head of state with reserved powers over government, the judiciary and the security forces, in a system widely described, including in international human rights reporting, as Africa's last absolute monarchy. On 19 April 2018, during the fiftieth anniversary of independence, Mswati III announced the kingdom would officially be renamed the Kingdom of Eswatini, reviving the siSwati name used before colonial rule and, by his own account, avoiding the recurring confusion with Switzerland. The move drew a legal challenge from a rights activist who argued it had been decided without public consultation, though the change stood. Two ceremonies still bind this history, ancient and recent, into a living calendar. Incwala, the ritual of kingship, unfolds over roughly a month around the summer solstice and exists only because a king exists to hold it, moving from a smaller ceremony to the great Incwala, when young men cut branches of the sacred lusekwane tree to build a ceremonial enclosure and the king, in full regalia, tastes the first fruits of the new season before anyone else may eat them. Ritual specialists known as the bemanti, the water people, fetch river and sea water to renew the king's strength for the year ahead, and the songs and rites performed inside the enclosure are considered too sacred to be recorded or written down, so visitors may watch the public ceremony from a respectful distance while the inner rites stay closed. Umhlanga, the reed dance, is more visible, since over eight days each year unmarried girls and young women cut reeds and carry them to the Queen Mother's residence at Ludzidzini before dancing in vast columns, singing and stamping in full traditional dress. It is free and open to visitors on the main day without advance booking, though it remains a national institution rather than a show staged for tourists, and outsiders are expected to watch as guests rather than as participants, ideally alongside a local guide who can explain what is unfolding. That layered history is what a visitor actually walks into today. At Ngwenya, the mine that may be the oldest in the world is open for guided tours into the old workings, a short drive from the Ngwenya Glass complex, where craftspeople trained through an exchange with Sweden's Kosta Boda glassworks turn recycled glass into tableware and animal figures in full view of visitors. Further into the Ezulwini Valley, the royal heartland Sobhuza I chose two centuries ago, Mantenga Nature Reserve holds both the thundering ninety-five metre Mantenga Falls and a reconstructed mid nineteenth-century Swazi homestead where a resident cultural troupe performs traditional dance daily, while nearby the Swazi Candles centre at Malkerns has grown into one of the country's main craft destinations. Conservation has its own royal history here too. Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary, the country's oldest protected area, began in 1961 when Ted Reilly converted his family's cattle land into a sanctuary for dwindling wildlife, and Hlane Royal National Park followed in 1967 on the instruction of King Sobhuza II, and both, with the more remote Mkhaya Game Reserve, are still run by the trust Reilly founded. Malolotja Nature Reserve, the largest protected area in the kingdom at 18,000 hectares of highland grassland and forested gorge, sits in the cooler northwest near Ngwenya, while above Mbabane, Sibebe Rock rises as a granite dome roughly three billion years old and so large that only Australia's Uluru is reckoned to surpass it, its slopes holding rock art left by San painters some four thousand years ago and hiking trails now guided by the local community. Move through this history the way you would move through anyone's family history, with curiosity rather than entitlement. Incwala's inner ceremonies are not there to be photographed or narrated, and no guide will take you past the point where you are meant to stop. Umhlanga is a young woman's rite of passage on her own culture's terms rather than a performance assembled for a foreign camera, and the courtesy the warriors and dancers extend to onlookers is best repaid with quiet attention rather than with intrusive filming. Ask before photographing the cultural village performers, tip the community guides who lead you up Sibebe or into the Ngwenya workings, and remember that the land under Mlilwane's rhino and Malolotja's waterfalls carries the weight of a kingdom that fought, over more than a century, simply to keep it.