Cultural life

Early history

The Swazi nation is a relatively recent political grouping, the main amalgamation of clans having taken place under Dlamini military hegemony about the middle of the 19th century. However, the record of human settlement in what is now Eswatini stretches far back into prehistory. The earliest stone tools, found on ancient river terraces, date back more than 250,000 years, and later stone implements are associated with evidence of Homo sapiens from perhaps as long ago as 100,000 years. By 42,000 years ago the inhabitants were quarrying red and black hematite ore for cosmetic purposes on the top of the Ngwenya massif (where in 1964 a large opencut mining operation was developed to exploit the rich ore deposit). This ranks as one of the world’s earliest mining and trading activities, and mining continued for many thousands of years after that. Much later—about 20,000 years ago—the archaeological record reveals occupation by the ancestors of the San hunter-gatherers, who created the distinctive rock paintings found throughout the western part of the country.

About 2,000 years ago groups of Bantu-speaking peoples (Nguni, Sotho, and Tswana) moved southward across the Limpopo River. They cultivated crops, kept livestock (sheep and goats), used pottery, and smelted iron—hence their designation as Early Iron Age peoples. At a later date cattle were introduced. These people are recorded at Ngwenya, where the mining of iron ore has been dated to about 400 ce. During the following centuries the more attractive areas of Eswatini were settled by these ancestors of the Nguni and Sotho clans, whom the Swazi encountered in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

The ancestors of the Dlamini clan were part of this southward movement, which reached the Delagoa Bay area (now Maputo) of Mozambique some considerable time before the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 16th century. There they settled as part of the Thembe-Tonga group of peoples until the mid-18th century, when, probably because of dynastic conflict, they moved southward along the coastal plain between the mountains and the Indian Ocean—“scourging the Lubombo,” as a royal praise song puts it. Up to this time they called themselves Emalangeni, after an ancestral Langa. Later they moved westward through the Lubombo range and up the Pongola valley, where about 1770 under their king Ngwane III they established the first nucleus of the Swazi nation (bakaNgwane) near what is now Nhlangano.

Emergence of the Swazi nation

This was a turbulent period in the history of southeastern Africa, when a number of major clan groupings were struggling for supremacy. Two of these, the Ndwandwe and the Zulu, located to the south of the new Ngwane homeland, constituted a serious threat to the Dlamini, who strove to establish their control over the clans among whom they had settled. Nevertheless, by the end of the century, they had achieved considerable success in assimilating some of these clans and in forging bonds with others to create a new political grouping. However, this new power base was not strong enough to ward off aggression by their southern neighbours, so about 1820 under their new king—Sobhuza I, or Somhlohlo (“The Wonder”)—they moved northward to establish a safer heartland in central Eswatini (the Middleveld). There the Dlamini consolidated their power under Sobhuza I and his son Mswati II. Part of this success must be attributed to Sobhuza’s adoption of the Zulu age-group system of military organization, which created regiments across clan loyalties and which was at all times strictly disciplined. By 1860 they had extended their power through conquest and assimilation far beyond the boundaries of present-day Eswatini under Mswati II, whom later generations described as “their greatest fighting king” and who gave his name to the nation.

At the peak of their power, however, a new factor had emerged in the regional geopolitics, which over the next 40 years caused the gradual contraction of Swazi territorial and political authority. This was the competing pressure from the expanding Boer republic of the Transvaal and from the growing British imperial presence, especially after the discovery in South Africa of diamonds in 1867 and gold in 1871.

The main destabilizing force was the stream into the country of European prospectors and concession hunters, which the Swazi were able to contain for a while but which became a flood after the kingship passed to Mbandzeni in 1875. By 1890 so many concessions had been granted for so many purposes (in addition to land and mineral rights) that practically the whole country was covered two, three, or even four deep in concessions of all kinds and for different periods. Although the Swazi maintained that these were all leasehold rights that would terminate at some future date, they had, as it later transpired, signed away their independence.

In 1888 the Swazi tried to regulate the new influences that the influx of Europeans had created by granting them a charter of conditional self-government subject to the royal veto. Behind the concessions scramble by individuals, however, lay the intrigue and conflict of the two white powers, the Boers and the British. The former needed a route to the sea, while the latter wanted to contain them. The area inhabited by the Swazi stood in the way, as an obstacle to be manipulated by both.

In 1890, under a convention between the British government and the South African Republic, a provisional government consisting of representatives of the two powers and a representative of the Swazi people was set up. In 1893 the British government signed a new convention permitting the South African Republic to negotiate with the Swazi regent and her council for a proclamation allowing the republic to assume powers of jurisdiction, legislation, and administration without the incorporation of Swaziland, as it was then known, into the republic. The Swazi refused to sign the proclamation, but in 1894 another convention was signed by the two powers, virtually giving unilateral effect to its terms. After the South African War of 1899–1902 all the rights and powers of the republic passed to Great Britain, and in June 1903, by an order in council under the Foreign Jurisdiction Act, the governor of the Transvaal was empowered to administer Swaziland and to legislate by proclamation. In 1906 these powers were transferred to a high commissioner for Basutoland, Bechuanaland, and Swaziland.