Eswatini's history: a kingdom that bought back its own land

Who lived between the Drakensberg and the Lubombo first

The oldest traces of people in what is now Eswatini are stone tools from the Early Stone Age, which Wikipedia's account of the country dates to around 200,000 years ago. Rock paintings survive from about 27,000 years ago into the nineteenth century. On Bomvu Ridge, north-west of Mbabane, the Lion Cavern at the Ngwenya iron mine was worked for haematite and specularite ochre, for cosmetic and ritual use. The Encyclopedia of the Nations gives the carbon-14 dating as 43,000 to 41,000 BC until at least 23,000 BC, and the Eswatini Tourism Authority calls Ngwenya the "World's Oldest mine". Iron ore was mined there in the twentieth century, and the mine closed in 1977.

The earliest inhabitants known by name were Khoisan hunter-gatherers. Farmers who spoke Bantu languages came later, and evidence of agriculture and iron working dates from about the fourth century. People speaking languages ancestral to modern Sotho and Nguni were settling the area no later than the eleventh century, bringing cattle, seed and worked iron, wood, hide and clay.

The ruling Swazi trace themselves to the Embo-Dlamini, a branch of the Embo-Nguni who lived among the Tembe near Delagoa Bay, the site of modern Maputo. A Dlamini praise name, tsine lesavela eluhlangeni, describes the clan as having originated from the reeds, which the historian J. S. M. Matsebula reads as a memory of crossing the Zambezi on reeds. In the early eighteenth century a group under Dlamini III moved inland to the Ngwavuma area of the Lubombo Mountains, and he died at Zibayaneni in 1744.

How the Dlamini kings built a nation of clans

Ngwane III, Dlamini III's successor, is counted as the first king of modern Eswatini. He crossed the Pongola River and, under pressure from the Ndwandwe of Zwide kaLanga, set his capital at Shiselweni at the foot of the Mhlosheni hills; the Eswatini Tourism Authority places his first ceremonial capital near today's Nhlangano. The country was named KaNgwane after him, and its people BakaNgwane, a name still used beside emaSwati.

Ndvungunye followed in 1780 and was killed by lightning in 1815. His son Sobhuza I, called Somhlolo, moved the capital north to a new Zombodze in the centre of the country and absorbed the clans already living there, whom the Swazi call Emakhandzambili, "those found ahead". He married Tsandzile, a daughter of the Ndwandwe king, and used alliance with Shaka when it suited him, so that the Mfecane wars largely passed the kingdom by. Independence Day is still named after him.

Mswati II, king from 1839, gave the nation its name. He reorganised the regiments, campaigned as far as the Zoutpansberg and Ohrigstad, ruled from Hhohho in the north and cut back the autonomy of the older clans; Wikipedia's history credits him with a kingdom twice the area of the present one. Britannica dates his reign 1840 to 1868; Wikipedia ends it with his death in 1865. People absorbed under him were called Emafikamuva, "those who came behind", and the clans that came with the Dlamini were the Bemdzabuko, "true Swazi". Britannica counts more than 70 clans in the nation, with the Dlamini the largest.

Why the concessions cost the Swazi their land

Trekboers reached the western edge of the kingdom in the 1840s, and by 1845 about 300 Boer families had settled at Ohrigstad. Two deeds dated 1846 and 1855 record sales of Swazi territory to the Dutch republics for 170 cattle; read at face value they surrendered the whole kingdom, though the Boers of the time could not act on them. The South African Republic tried to annex Swaziland by proclamation in 1868.

The Pretoria Convention of 1881 guaranteed the kingdom's independence and fixed its boundary in article 24, and the London Convention of 1884 repeated the guarantee. The boundary left many Swazi as residents of the Transvaal, in what is now Mpumalanga. The Swazi people's article on Wikipedia records that the king did not sign the 1881 convention and that the Swazi claim land beyond the present border in every direction.

Inside the line, Mbandzeni granted concessions for grazing, farming, minerals, tax collection and the post. The Encyclopedia of the Nations says their number is what persuaded Britain that some form of control was needed. After his death in 1889 a provisional administration of British, Transvaal and Swazi representatives sat from 1890 with a court to sort valid concessions from dubious ones, and a convention of 1894 made Swaziland a protected state of the South African Republic. That arrangement ended when the South African War began in October 1899. Ngwane V died that December during the incwala, and his son Sobhuza II, four months old, was chosen king under the regency of his grandmother Labotsibeni Mdluli.

The war reached the kingdom in raids and skirmishes. In 1901 British columns crossed into Swaziland in pursuit of Boer commandos, Swazi regiments acting on the regent's orders cleared Boers from their land, and a Boer commando burned Bremersdorp, now Manzini, in July 1901. The last Boer unit in the country was defeated in February 1902.

How Britain ruled through the Swazi monarchy

An order in council of 1903 placed Swaziland under British administration, run from the Transvaal until 1906 and from 1907 by the high commissioner for South Africa, with a resident commissioner on the ground. Britain grouped it with Basutoland and Bechuanaland as a High Commission Territory and long expected it to be absorbed into South Africa.

The decisive act was the partition. The Swaziland Concessions Partition Proclamation of 1907 let a commissioner take up to a third of each concession without compensation for Swazi use. When he finished in 1910, 1,639,687 acres, about 38% of the country, were reserved for the Swazi, and Swazi living on the other land were given five years to leave. Labotsibeni sent men to work in the Transvaal to earn money to buy land back.

Sobhuza II took over from the regent in December 1921. He led a deputation to London on the land question in 1922, and Wikipedia's biography of him dates a case before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council to 1929, lost on the Foreign Jurisdiction Act of 1890, which put a protectorate's administration beyond the British courts. A European Advisory Council of elected white settlers was set up in 1921. Britain made the king the native authority for the Swazi by proclamation, a measure Wikipedia's history dates to 1944 and the Encyclopedia of the Nations to 1941, and revised it in 1952 to give him a degree of autonomy that Wikipedia calls unprecedented in British indirect rule. By 1964 the area reserved for the Swazi had risen to 56% of the country.

How independence turned into rule by decree

Britain promulgated a constitution in November 1963 with legislative and executive councils, over the objection of the king's Swazi National Council. The king's advisers formed the Imbokodvo National Movement, which took all 24 elective seats in the 1964 Legislative Council election. A revised constitution with a House of Assembly and a Senate followed, elections were held in 1967, and Swaziland became independent within the Commonwealth on 6 September 1968. Prince Makhosini, the first prime minister, announced independence at a cattle byre in Lobamba. The United Nations admitted the country on 24 September 1968.

In the first post-independence election, in May 1972, Imbokodvo took close to 75% of the vote and the Ngwane National Liberatory Congress slightly more than 20%, enough for three seats. On 12 April 1973 Sobhuza II repealed the constitution, dissolved parliament and assumed supreme executive, legislative and judicial power, banning political activity and trade unions as alien to the Swazi way of life. Human Rights Watch's World Report 2022, covering the events of 2021, recorded that the 1973 decree banning political parties remained in force.

A new constitution was promulgated in 1978, and the first non-party elections were held that year through the tinkhundla, constituencies set by the king. The parliament convened in January 1979 was chosen partly by indirect election and partly by royal appointment. Until 1993 the ballot was not secret: voters passed through a gate marked for their candidate while officials counted them.

The king also looked outward for land. A deal negotiated with South Africa in 1982 would have transferred the KaNgwane homeland and part of KwaZulu, giving the kingdom access to the sea; it met opposition in the territory concerned and was never carried out. The Encyclopedia of the Nations records a secret security agreement with South Africa the same year, under which ANC members were arrested and deported, and South African raids that killed ANC members in Swaziland in late 1985 and 1986.

What changed after Sobhuza II died

Sobhuza II died on 21 August 1982, after a reign that Wikipedia's biography gives as 82 years and 254 days. Queen Dzeliwe became regent. The Liqoqo, the royal advisory council, took effective power, removed her and installed another of Sobhuza's wives as Queen Regent, in August 1983 by the Encyclopedia of the Nations' dating and in 1984 by Wikipedia's; her son was crowned king on 25 April 1986 and the Liqoqo was then reduced to an advisory body. A new parliament was elected in November 1987.

Pressure for reform came from below. An underground party, the People's United Democratic Movement, campaigned from 1988, and a review commission reported in 1992; the 1993 election added a secret ballot, voter registration and 55 constituencies, up from 50. The Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions led a general strike in 1997. A constitutional review commission appointed in July 1996 took submissions at the tinkhundla, and the constitution that came out of the process was signed on 26 July 2005 and, Britannica notes, took effect by royal decree on 8 February 2006. It establishes a "tinkhundla-based system" with election on "individual merit", and Wikipedia notes that it does not clearly deal with the status of political parties.

The first election under it was held in 2008. In 2011 a fall in Southern African Customs Union receipts caused a fiscal crisis, and the government declined a loan from South Africa because its conditions included political reform. On 19 April 2018, the fiftieth anniversary of independence, the king announced that the Kingdom of Swaziland would be called the Kingdom of Eswatini. Freedom House notes that the change was made without any constitutional process or vote in parliament.

How the protests for reform were met

Protests began in May 2021 after the death of Thabani Nkomonye, a law student, in a killing Human Rights Watch reported as allegedly committed by police. In June, after the government stopped petitions for reform being delivered to tinkhundla offices, demonstrations spread across the country, shops and buildings were looted and burned, and police and soldiers were deployed. Human Rights Watch reported that the internet was shut from about 4.30 p.m. on 29 June to around 9 a.m. on 30 June 2021.

The casualty figures differ by who counted. Human Rights Watch's World Report 2022, covering the events of 2021, gave at least 50 people killed and property worth an estimated R3 billion looted or damaged. Wikipedia's account of the country gives at least 20 killed by state security forces. The People's United Democratic Movement put the number injured at more than 250 at the end of June 2021. The government denied reports that the king had left the country.

Two members of parliament, Mduduzi Bacede Mabuza and Mthandeni Dube, were arrested in July 2021 and charged under the Suppression of Terrorism Act. Freedom House records their conviction for terrorism and sedition in June 2023, and Amnesty International their sentences of 25 and 18 years in July 2024; Amnesty describes them as prisoners of conscience, and Dube was released on a royal pardon on 5 November 2025. The human rights lawyer Thulani Maseko, chairman of the Multi-Stakeholder Forum, was shot dead at his home in January 2023; Freedom House reported the killing unsolved at the end of that year and Amnesty found no credible progress in 2025. The ninth election under the tinkhundla system, in September 2023, was again held without parties.