Swaziland | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

About 4 pages (1,132 words)

Swaziland Summary

Swaziland

The Kingdom of Swaziland is a small landlocked country in southern Africa bordered on three sides by South Africa and to the east by Mozambique. Roughly the size of the U.S. state of Rhode Island, the country is mountainous with steplike plateaus descending from high through middle to low. Well-watered, it is cut by four major river systems increasingly used for the irrigation of sugar, cotton, and citrus cultivation.

In 2000, its population was estimated at 925,000, but there are certainly as many Swazis living in South Africa. The bulk live in the KwaZulu and Mpumalanga provinces of South Africa, sections of which formed part of the larger nineteenth-century Swazi state and which form the basis of a current Swazi land claim against South Africa. Swaziland also claims most of Mozambique's southern province up to its capital, Maputo. These land claims are sources of occasional tension between Swaziland and its neighbors.

The modern Swazi state emerged in the mid-nineteenth century as part of a process of regional state formation and dissolution triggered by the development in northern KwaZulu of a powerful Zulu empire under King Shaka (c. 1787–1828). As Zulu power expanded, numerous groups fled northward in an attempt to preserve their autonomy. The Dlamini clan sought refuge in the Lebombo mountain range. Through skillful defensive military tactics and a series of alliances with British and Boer groups and then penetrating central South Africa, the Swazis resisted Zulu incorporation and emerged as an autonomous and homogeneous entity dominated by the Dlaminis.

By the 1890s, this independence was threatened by a rush of British and other white settlers seeking fortunes on the newly opened goldfields of the South African interior. British colonial power loomed and in 1894, the Swazis signed a protectorate arrangement with the Transvaal Boer Republic. This was shortlived, and in 1902 Swaziland became a British colony after the British annexed the Boer states after victory in the South African or Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902.

The colonial era spanned the period from 1902 to 1968, during which the Swazis were forcibly removed from more than half of their land area, which was ceded to white settler farmers and corporate agricultural companies. In the one-third of the territory set aside for exclusive Swazi occupation, the traditional institutions of governance (i.e., monarchical and chiefly authority) were left intact. In the 1960s, the British agreed to grant Swaziland independence in terms of a Westminster-type constitution that allowed for multiparty elections on a basis of universal suffrage. To contest the pre-independence elections, the king, Sobhuza II (1898–1982), formed a political party, the Imbokodvo National Movement (INM). Articulating an ideology of tradition and narrow ethnic nationalism, it basically expressed the political and class interests terms of the royalist aristocracy.

In the 1968 independence elections, the INM captured all seats, and although power was constitutionally vested in the elected legislature, nothing was done without the king's expressed approval. In the first post-independence election in 1972, an opposition group, the Ngwane (the Siswati language name for Swaziland) National Liberation Congress (NNLC) won three seats. In response, Sobhuza declared a state of emergency, closed down parliament and banned all political parties, including his own INM. Political parties, he declared, were foreign elements fostering disunity. This emergency state persisted into the early 2000s.

(MAP BY MARYLAND CARTOGRAPHICS/THE GALE GROUP)

In the years since the state of emergency was declared, the monarchy has consolidated its monopoly over political affairs and acquired a strong economic base through a royalist controlled corporation (the Tibiyo Fund), which has a strategy of acquiring equity on behalf of the "Swazi Nation," (i.e., the aristocracy) in enterprises spread across all sectors of the economy.

The ruling group's conservatism and hostility to democracy was demonstrated in the 1980s when King Sobhuza entered into a secret security pact with apartheid South Africa allowing its security forces to undertake border-crossing incursions targeting South Africa's African National Congress operatives and their local sympathizers. In 1984, the Swazi government banned the African National Congress from operating in the country and expelled its membership. Most were sent to Zambia and Tanzania, but some were allowed to fall into South African hands.

In 2005 Swaziland remained an absolute monarchy with effective executive and legislative—and increasingly judicial—power vested in the king, Mswati II (b. 1958), and a small coterie of unelected princes and chiefs and some commoners. The country is a no-party state with the prohibition on political parties still extant. Some political groups such as the Ngwane National Liberatory Congress (NNLC) have unilaterally unbanned themselves but are subject to severe repression and cannot function openly. The bicameral legislature comprises a lower house of fifty-five directly elected members but all candidates are prescreened for their "suitability" by the traditional authorities in each electoral area, and none may run on a party platform. The upper house consists of thirty members, of whom twenty are nominated by the king. The monarch also selects the prime minister and cabinet. Parliament is not an autonomous body and has historically functioned as a monarchical rubber stamp.

The constitutional review process inaugurated in 1996 remains stalled in 2005 with certain proposals, such as the legalization of political parties and the inclusion of a diluted bill of rights, which the king has declared unacceptable. The resulting political paralysis has intensified the drift to arbitrary and personal rule by the monarchy.

A crisis over the rule of law and the administration of justice was in effect in the early twenty-first century, occasioned by the refusal in November 2002 of the king and his government to accept two rulings of the court of appeal. In protest, all the judges of the court resigned, and the country was left without an appellate bench. The result has been a clogging of the judicial process with hundreds of civil and criminal cases at appeal stage and unable to be concluded. This is a serious violation of the right to legal remedy.

A humanitarian emergency has been triggered by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has infected an estimated 38 percent of Swazis. This is the world's highest infection rate and a situation that has overwhelmed the state health system. Coping with the crisis has been assumed by a private-sector group.