Eswatini

Eswatini steps down in four bands from its western heights. The Highveld is cool grassland and pine plantation, rising to Emlembe; below come the rolling Middleveld and the hot Lowveld bush, which ends at the ridge of the Lubombo Mountains. The Komati, the Usutu and the Mbuluzi cross these bands towards the Indian Ocean. At Ngwenya, in the north-west, people dug red ochre and haematite from a hillside more than forty millennia ago, in one of the oldest known mines.

Swazi tradition traces the nation to Ngwane III, who led his clans to the Pongola River in the eighteenth century. Sobhuza I drew neighbouring chiefdoms together, and his son Mswati II gave the Swazi their name. Concession-seekers flocked in during the 1880s; the Transvaal republic ran the kingdom from 1894, and Britain took it as a protectorate after the South African War. Sobhuza II, king from infancy in 1899, led it to independence in September 1968. The name Eswatini, ‘land of the Swazi’, was adopted in 2018.

Two ceremonies mark the royal year: Incwala, around the December solstice, renews the kingship with sacred songs, and Umhlanga, the Reed Dance of late winter, brings tens of thousands of young women to cut reeds for the queen mother. Irrigated cane on the Lowveld estates at Big Bend, Mhlume and Simunye feeds the sugar mills, a plant at Matsapha makes soft-drink concentrate, and Highveld pine, citrus, textiles and candles from Malkerns go abroad.