Eswatini

The kingdom of the Lion and the She-Elephant, Africa's last absolute monarchy

Eswatini, known as Swaziland until 2018, grew from the southward movement of Nguni-speaking peoples into south-eastern Africa and the rise of the Dlamini royal house. Tradition regards Ngwane III, in the mid-eighteenth century, as the first king of the Swazi, whose followers took the name bakaNgwane. During the upheavals of the mfecane, Sobhuza I consolidated a kingdom in the centre of the country, and his son Mswati II expanded it to its greatest extent in the mid-nineteenth century; from him the Swazi take their name. The kingdom is governed through a dual monarchy of the king, the Ngwenyama ('the Lion'), and the queen mother, the Ndlovukati ('the She-Elephant'). In the 1880s King Mbandzeni granted a flood of land, grazing and mineral concessions to Boer and British fortune-seekers, opening an era of foreign control. Administered first through the South African Republic and, after the Second Boer War, directly by Britain as a High Commission Territory, Swaziland was kept out of the Union of South Africa and gained independence from the United Kingdom on 6 September 1968 under King Sobhuza II. In 1973 Sobhuza repealed the independence constitution and ruled by decree; his successor Mswati III, crowned in 1986, presides over one of the world's last absolute monarchies, shaken by pro-democracy protests in 2021.