Eswatini
Capital: Mbabane · Southern Africa
One of Africa's last executive monarchies, where the Incwala kingship ceremony and the Umhlanga reed dance renew the Swazi nation each year.
Ethnic communities
More communities of Eswatini
- Dlamini royal clan · The Ngwenyama's house at the nation's heart
- Bemdzabuko core clans · 'True Swazi' founding lineages
- Emakhandzambili clans · 'Found-ahead' peoples absorbed with rights
- Emafikamuva clans · Later-arrival lineages of the kingdom
- Nkhosi lineages · Chiefly houses across the four regions
- Highveld herding folk · Mountain cattle-post communities
- Middleveld farmers · The maize-and-homestead heartland
- Lubombo communities · Eastern ridge's mixed farming villages
- Cane-belt families · Lowveld sugar-estate communities
- Sotho-descended villages · Border-hill communities of mixed speech
- Tsonga-Shangaan kin · Eastern families of Mozambique links
- Craft lineages · Grass-weave, wood and bead heritage makers
Languages
Major languages: siSwati, English
Language families: Niger-Congo (Bantu, Nguni)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Kingdom of Eswatini (Swazi Kingdom)
Heritage sites
- • Ngwenya Mine (world's oldest known mine)
- • Malolotja
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Eswatini
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Music & the artsb. 1978
Bholoja
Swazi soul
Built a genre he calls Swazi soul from siSwati storytelling and acoustic guitar, and is the country's most visible musical export.
- Sportb. 1988
Sibusiso Matsenjwa
Sprinting
National record holder at 200m and Eswatini's most successful track athlete on the African circuit.
- Politics & liberation1899–1982
Sobhuza II
Monarchy
Reigned for 82 years, among the longest documented reigns anywhere, and led the country to independence in 1968 while restoring alienated land.
Deep-dive community profiles
Basotho of Eswatini
Sotho-speaking communities in the north-western highveld of Eswatini, absorbed into a Swazi kingdom whose national identity is emphatically Nguni, and whose language has no place in its schools.
Open deep profile →Bemdzabuko
The true Swazi — the Dlamini and the clans that travelled with them from the north, whose arrival made the kingdom, and whose descent is the standard against which every other Swazi clan is still classified.
Open deep profile →Emafikamuva
Those who arrived after — the clans that joined the Swazi kingdom late, including refugees from the Zulu wars and Sotho and Tsonga groups, absorbed as full members but with the newest and weakest claims to land.
Open deep profile →Emakhandzambili
Those found ahead — the clans already living in the Swazi country when the Dlamini arrived, absorbed into the kingdom on terms that gave them ritual precedence over the land and a permanently ambiguous political standing.
Open deep profile →Shangane of Eswatini
The Tsonga-speaking communities of the eastern lowveld — families of the Lubombo borderlands who move between three countries for work and family, and whose language has no official standing in the kingdom they live in.
Open deep profile →Swazi (emaSwati)
The nation of the Incwala — Africa's great kingship-renewal ceremony — and the Umhlanga reed dance, where the Ngwenyama and the Ndlovukati (Lion and She-Elephant) rule a dual monarchy that danced its way through empire into the continent's last absolute kingship.
Open deep profile →Swazi of Nkomazi
The Swazi of South Africa's eastern lowveld, cut off from their kingdom by a colonial boundary, made citizens of the KaNgwane bantustan, and the community that in 1982 refused to be handed over to Eswatini and won.
Open deep profile →