The history of Eswatini

Eswatini, formerly Swaziland, is a small landlocked kingdom between South Africa and Mozambique, and one of the last absolute monarchies in the world. The Swazi state took shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries under kings of the Dlamini clan, who brought together many clans through conquest, marriage and refuge and survived the wars of the Mfecane by careful diplomacy. In the late nineteenth century European concession-hunters, the Boer republic of the Transvaal and Britain competed for control, and from 1903 the country was a British territory in which two-thirds of the land passed to settlers and companies. Independence in 1968 was followed by a return to royal rule under Sobhuza II and his son Mswati III, whose government has faced growing demands for democracy.

People have lived in the area for a very long time. Stone tools of the Early Stone Age are found across the country, and rock paintings made by San hunter-gatherers over thousands of years survive in shelters in the hills. At Ngwenya, near the western border, people dug haematite and specularite for red pigment in what is often described as one of the oldest known mines in the world, worked over tens of thousands of years. The San were the land's only inhabitants for most of its history.

From around the fourth century CE farming communities using iron, part of the long Bantu expansion across eastern and southern Africa, began to settle the region, bringing cattle, crops and pottery. Over the following centuries, and certainly by the eleventh century, people speaking languages ancestral to the Nguni and Sotho languages of today lived in the area. The San were gradually absorbed or displaced, though their clicks entered the Nguni languages.

The Swazi royal house traces its origins to the Embo-Nguni, who settled near Delagoa Bay, the site of modern Maputo in Mozambique, within the sphere of the Tembe chiefdoms that grew rich from coastal trade. According to oral tradition, a group led by members of the Dlamini clan moved inland to the Lubombo mountains in the early eighteenth century under Dlamini III. His son Ngwane III, regarded as the first king of the modern Swazi state, crossed the Pongola river around the middle of the century and settled in what is now southern Eswatini, at Zombodze in the Shiselweni area. From him the country took its older name, KaNgwane, and its people the name bakaNgwane.

The kingdom grew by drawing in neighbouring clans. Swazi tradition distinguishes the Bemdzabuko, the true Swazi who came with the Dlamini; the Emakhandzambili, the clans found already living in the land; and the Emafikamuva, the late arrivals absorbed later. Royal power rested on a dual monarchy: the king, the Ingwenyama or Lion, ruled together with his mother, the Ndlovukati or She-Elephant, who held her own court and ritual authority, and during a king's minority a queen regent governed. The great annual Incwala ceremony renewed the kingship and the nation.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the region between the Drakensberg and the sea was transformed by the rise of powerful, militarised states, the Mthethwa, the Ndwandwe under Zwide and then the Zulu Kingdom under Shaka. The Swazi under Sobhuza I, also called Somhlolo, who became king in 1815, were pressed by the Ndwandwe and moved their royal centre north into the heart of the present country. Sobhuza combined military strength with diplomacy: he married a daughter of Zwide, sent royal women to Shaka as wives, and avoided direct war with the Zulu, so that his people largely escaped the devastation of the Mfecane, the period of upheaval and migration that remade southern Africa. He incorporated many local clans and is remembered in tradition for a dream in which he foresaw the coming of white people bearing a book and money.

His son Mswati II, who reigned from 1839 to 1865, is remembered as the greatest of the Swazi fighting kings, and the names Swazi and Eswatini derive from him. He reorganised the army into age regiments on the Zulu model, crushed the more independent Emakhandzambili chiefs, raided widely for cattle and captives, and at its peak his kingdom covered roughly twice the area of today's country, reaching north towards Barberton. Mswati faced Zulu attacks and the arrival of Boer settlers from the 1840s, and he granted the Boers land along his western borders, though the meaning of those grants was disputed. Wesleyan missionaries opened the first mission at Mahamba in 1844, beginning the long spread of Christianity, which most Swazi now profess.

After Mswati's death the Transvaal Boers of the South African Republic and the British in Natal both sought influence. King Mbandzeni, who reigned from 1875 to 1889, helped the British defeat the Pedi king Sekhukhune in 1879, and the Pretoria Convention of 1881 and the London Convention of 1884, agreed between Britain and the Transvaal, guaranteed Swazi independence but fixed borders that left many Swazi outside the kingdom, in what is now Mpumalanga in South Africa. The gold rush in the eastern Transvaal brought a flood of speculators, and Mbandzeni granted concessions over grazing, farming, mining, customs, the postal service and much else, often overlapping, until almost the entire country and its revenues had been signed away. He seems to have understood many grants as leases rather than sales, a difference that shaped the later land question.

After his death in 1889 a joint government of British, Transvaal and Swazi representatives tried to sort out the concessions, and in 1894 a convention between Britain and the Transvaal made Swaziland a protected state administered by the South African Republic, against the wishes of the queen regent Tibati and the Swazi council. King Ngwane V, called Bhunu, was crowned in 1895 and died in December 1899, during the Incwala, shortly after the outbreak of the Second Boer War. His son Sobhuza II was only months old, and his grandmother Labotsibeni Mdluli became queen regent. During the war Swazi forces, encouraged by the British, attacked retreating Boer commandos, while Labotsibeni tried to keep the kingdom out of the wider conflict and secure her grandson's throne.

After the Boer defeat the British Empire took over the administration of Swaziland in 1903, and it became one of the High Commission Territories, with Basutoland, now Lesotho, and Bechuanaland, now Botswana, governed by a resident commissioner under the British high commissioner in South Africa. A commission set out to resolve the concessions, and the partition proclamation of 1907, carried out by 1909, assigned only about a third of the land to the Swazi nation as reserves; the rest became crown land or was confirmed to European concession-holders, and Swazi living there were given five years to move or become labour tenants. The loss of land became the central grievance of the Swazi monarchy for the rest of the century. Labotsibeni encouraged Swazi to work in the mines of Johannesburg and contribute to a national fund to buy land back.

Sobhuza II was installed as king in 1921 and led a deputation to London in 1922 to press the land question; a test case against the concessions was later lost before the Privy Council. Britain long expected that Swaziland would be absorbed into South Africa, as the 1909 South Africa Act allowed, but Swazi resistance and, after 1948, the apartheid policies of the National Party government made transfer politically impossible. Swazi soldiers served with British forces in the Second World War. After the war, schemes to buy back settler land, a royal fund and colonial land purchases restored a growing share of the country to Swazi control, while asbestos mining at Havelock, iron ore at Ngwenya, forestry and sugar estates developed the economy.

As Britain prepared to withdraw, new political parties formed in the towns, and the king and his council created their own party, the Imbokodvo National Movement, which won every elected seat in the Legislative Council in 1964 and again in the 1967 elections. Swaziland became independent on 6 September 1968, part of the wider decolonisation of Africa, as a constitutional monarchy with Sobhuza II as king. When the opposition Ngwane National Liberatory Congress won three seats in the 1972 election, Sobhuza repealed the constitution on 12 April 1973, dissolved parliament, banned political parties and assumed all powers, arguing that party politics was alien to the Swazi way of life. From 1978 a system based on tinkhundla, local constituencies, chose a parliament without parties. Throughout the apartheid years the kingdom remained economically bound to South Africa through the customs union, migrant labour and a currency pegged to the rand.

Sobhuza II died in August 1982, having reigned for nearly 83 years since December 1899, one of the longest reigns on record. A power struggle followed in which the queen regent Dzeliwe was ousted by the Liqoqo, the royal advisory council, and replaced by Ntombi Tfwala, mother of the heir, Prince Makhosetive. He returned from school in England and was crowned Mswati III on 25 April 1986, aged eighteen, and soon disbanded the Liqoqo.

Under Mswati III the monarchy has retained very wide powers, appointing the prime minister and many members of parliament and controlling large royal investment funds, while elections are held without parties. The underground People's United Democratic Movement and trade unions led demands for reform from the late 1980s, including a general strike in 1997. A constitution adopted in 2005 guaranteed some rights but left executive authority with the king and did not clearly allow parties to contest elections. The country suffered one of the worst HIV epidemics in the world, with more than a quarter of adults infected, and a fiscal crisis in 2011 when customs revenues fell. On 19 April 2018, the fiftieth anniversary year of independence, the king renamed the country the Kingdom of Eswatini.

In June 2021 pro-democracy protests spread across the country and turned into riots and looting, with buildings linked to the king set alight; the government imposed a curfew and deployed the army, and security forces fired live ammunition at protesters. On 21 January 2023 the human rights lawyer and opposition leader Thulani Maseko was shot dead at his home, hours after the king warned activists that mercenaries would deal with them, a killing that human rights groups and the United Nations demanded be investigated. Elections without parties were held again in September 2023. In 2025 Eswatini accepted deportees from the United States under an agreement with the US government. In April 2026 the kingdom celebrated the fortieth anniversary of Mswati III's coronation, with foreign leaders including South Africa's president in attendance, as debate continued over the future of Africa's last absolute monarchy.