As we know too well, history is no stranger to the idea that a single match can light a roaring fire.
The people of eSwatini — officially known as the Kingdom of eSwatini and formerly known as Swaziland, one of the world’s 12 remaining absolute monarchies — have reminded the world of just that. In June 2021, Siphiwe Mkhabela had to find the body of her son Thabani Nkomonye, a 25-year-old law student at the University of eSwatini, with its eyes gouged out and with three holes in it on a field in Nhlambeni, eSwatini. A death that was all but confirmed to be at the hands of the police gave rise to the unrelenting voice of the people of eSwatini.
Protests demanding justice bled into pro-democracy protests, which in turn bled into June 29, 2021, what is now remembered as the eSwatini massacre — a massacre of 80 protestors by the army and police forces. In spite of it all, King Mswati III’s grasp remains firmly and remorselessly on the throne, and democracy continues to elude the people of eSwatini.
The King and the People
“If you open the country’s constitution, it says the country is called Swaziland,” explained Manqoba Nxumalo, a human rights activist from Manzini, eSwatini and a founder of the eSwatini Solidarity Fund, in an interview with the HPR. “The king woke up on his birthday, without notice, without informing parliament, without debate, and just decided to change the name of the country [to eSwatini] which grammatically doesn’t even make sense. If there’s any symbol of absolute monarchy, it’s that.”
What explains King Mswati’s continued position as the last absolute monarch in Africa? “The number one thing is mythmaking,” according to Cebelihle Mbuyisa, an eSwatini-born writer and subeditor, also in conversation with the HPR. “For many years, the royal family has positioned itself and told stories about itself like some kind of saviors of the Swazi nation and preservers of our culture.”
In the words of Nxumalo, “In a continent where every other country [has had] some form of political conflict and civil strife, Swaziland has not had that…It has been idyllic and beautiful and peaceful, according to people outside the country, and seen as the last bastion of peace in a continent ravaged by conflict.” He continued, “the monarchy has postured itself as a pristine traditional stroke, a cultural heaven for the world to see how Africa was before colonialism.” For the most part, this benevolent picture has allowed eSwatini’s atrocities to occur beneath the radar of most human rights organizations.
Such is the myth of the Swazi royal family, as absurd as it is entrenched. King Mswati’s father, King Sobhuza II, observed the longest verifiable reign of any monarchy in recorded history, ruling for 82 years from 1899 to his death in 1982, with Mswati ruling since. Yet it is important that one looks beyond the spectacle of the monarchy and toward the devastating consequences of its authoritarianism.
Senseless name-changing is hardly the only sign of the king’s power over the people. “All I knew growing up, all I saw, was poverty: Young people, men and women, having to go through life without means, having to accept poverty as the default position through which to live their lives,” says Mbuyisa of his upbringing. It is this that led him to journalism: “In Swaziland, eventually you don’t expect anyone to take accountability. But things still must be noted. And that is why I decided to do journalism. Because of the suffering around me, I felt that it’s something that ought to be noted.”
To say that poverty in contemporary eSwatini is pervasive would be an understatement. “I mean, you can find economic hardships everywhere in Africa,” says Nxumalo, “they are very acute in this country.” Whichever indicator one chooses to use — unemployment, poverty, hunger, or inequality — points to a suffering people.
Yet as is often the case for countries of Africa and the Global South, it is a suffering that goes unnoticed. “It’s just unfortunate that it is only when people die, when there’s violence and brutality, that certain matters get attention,” remarked Qhawekazi Khumalo, Deputy Secretary in the external region of the People’s United Democratic Movement and a member of Swazi Lives Matter, a global solidarity movement, in an interview with the HPR. “Nobody is sending anything to Swaziland; I’ve never heard anybody sending anything to Swaziland like they do in Ukraine. The value attached to the lives of emaSwati (the Swazi people) is neither here nor there for the international community.”
Raising the Voice of the People
Each of the above economic conditions alone would be enough to push any society to the brink. Yet while the struggle in eSwatini has been gathering momentum for a while, it is only recently that it has reached its fullest expression. Part of the reason for this, according to Mbuyisa, was that “because of the mythmaking, people cannot imagine a life or a governance of the country outside of the royal family.” Khumalo added that since “most of us are born into oppression, it’s taken quite a lot for us to realize that, you know, it doesn’t have to be like this.”
There is also a brutally entrenched climate of repression, where neither political parties nor independent media are allowed to form. For Nxumalo, the reasons his people rose up and why he founded the eSwatini Solidarity Fund, a volunteer organization whose goal is to help activists and ordinary Swazis who are victims of state brutality and repression, are the same. “All of those things, a political and economic environment created by this absolute monarchy, account for why most Swazis stood up to fight but also why the Solidarity Fund had to come up,” he said. ‘It needed to respond to the massacre, not just a massacre that happened overnight, but rather a massacre that had been happening and maturing differently with the evolving of time.”
And so in a fashion and on a scale that the country had never seen before, the people of eSwatini registered their discontent, to deathly ends. “The younger generation just said this is it, we’ve had enough. We are tired of living in an underdeveloped country, where one man continues to live in luxury, where you see how this man is able to amass such a lot of wealth from the country’s resources and yet he has nothing to show for in terms of development, and a dignified life for the people,” said Khumalo.
Most, if not all, citizens, when asked what they are primarily calling for out on the roads, will give one answer: multiparty democracy. “In Africa, liberal democracy has been embraced almost everywhere,” Nxumalo notes, “even where there are war torn places they have embraced at least the basic tenets of multiparty democratic governance. How Africans have allowed Swaziland in the 21st century to have political parties banned is itself shocking.”
That PUDEMO, of which Qhawekazi Khumalo is a member, has managed not only to organize but to gain traction and membership is itself a significant and valiant response to the authoritarian power of the monarchy. “We want a multiparty democracy,” explains Khumalo, “and that is not for any co-option in any structure of the current government. It is an uprooting of those particular structures, because our oppression comes from those structures.”
As has been the case with all other liberation movements across Africa and the Global South, the tale of the people of eSwatini is one of oppression and resistance. The impunity and remorselessness of King Mswati’s regime is there for all to see, yet even behind that is another hidden layer of insidious suppression. As a journalist, Mbuyisa has borne witness to much of this. Speaking of PUDEMO he says, “there is nothing they haven’t suffered.”
The most brutal instrument of the state is the police, who, in Mbuyisa’ words, have a particular modus operandi: “They will go to any roadblock, to any protest, to any march, and fire guns; fire at random, a few gunshots to the air, and then aim the gun, just kill one person and then leave.” He further explained that they have already done this before. “That’s what they did in many, many sites around the country. July 4, 2021, they shot a guy in Ngwenya, and I happened to be there.”
Mbuyisa’s experiences are not solely as a witness. At the height of eSwatini’s unrest last year, he and another journalist, Magnificent Mndebele, working at New Frame, were dispatched to report on the protests. They sensed that they were being surveilled, and had it confirmed when they were followed and threatened to delete whatever they had gathered. Mbuyisa and Mndebele were later stopped on the highway and taken to a nearby police station, where they were detained, interrogated, assaulted, and tortured.
“You come close to dying and you see that, oh, these people can really kill you,” Mbuyisa said.
No Going Back from Here
In a situation so seemingly intractable, one looks for signs of hope. In a country where the vast majority was once forcibly apolitical, one sure sign is a rapidly increasing level of political consciousness amongst the citizens of eSwatini. “I go home and my grandmother is political now, “ Mbuyisa remarked. “All of a sudden, all she can talk about is politics.”
Public consciousness is as good a sign as any for future prospects, but even then, only so much can be known, and much is to be seen in the land of eSwatini. In spite of the agony and suppression they have borne witness to and endured, Nxumalo, Mbuyisa, and Khumalo shared a firm belief that the arch of eSwatini’s tale would bend towards the ideals that have brought its people to the streets. Thomas Sankara, central to the story of African liberation, once said that “we must dare to invent the future.” Responding to this provocation, Nxumalo astutely said, “I want to imagine a future Swaziland that does not want to be like all the other failed liberation movements of Africa, because as much as King Swati has been a bad leader, it’s no guarantee that we will move from King Swati to paradise.”
Here Nxumalo urges a necessary grappling with the past to chart a course towards the future, recalling the many instances in which the high hopes of finally liberated African nations have dwindled in the face of novel yet similarly oppressive fates. “Zimbabweans were promised a better life; it is not happening today, because of the very same people that promised them. Mozambique, you name it; Zambia, you name it; South Africa, you name it. We also are in no guarantee that because you say King Swati is governing badly, then you have a better future.”
For Nxumalo, though, this stained history acts as both a gift and a curse. “Our responsibility and my wish is that we have got to begin to look now at what it is that we want to do differently. We could very well be lucky because we will be liberated very late. And therefore, we have all these lessons from all over. So Swaziland has got to be better than what it is now. But it’s got to be different [through] all the lessons from Africa.”
The Swaziland that Khumalo envisions is straightforward: “My desire for Swaziland is what Swaziland wants for itself.” Mbuyisa, too, put it bluntly: “there should be no kings. There should be no gods. Because kings are gods. And gods are infallible.”
When eSwatini’s neighbor, South Africa, teetered on the brink of civil war, and before that when its resistance movement had stagnated by virtue of the apartheid government’s brutal repression, it was the international community who lent an invaluable helping hand, echoed the calls for democracy, and displayed solidarity in the best sense of the word. As the work to topple the regime inside eSwatini continues, the rest of the world dare not turn away. One has the sense that change is imminent, and history will remember us as vocal allies or silent adversaries to what unfolds.
Image by S’mile Vilakati is licensed under the Unsplash License.
