Introduction: The Swazi of South Africa

South Africa's intention of transferring to Swaziland the KaNgwane Bantustan and the Ingwavuma district became public knowledge in June 1982 when the KaNgwane Legislative Assembly was suddenly abolished and when the South African government took over the administration of the Ingwavuma district from the KwaZulu Bantustan. Legal action by the leaders of the KaNgwane and KwaZulu Bantustans, Enos Mabuza and Chief Gatsha Buthelezi, respectively, resulted in defeats for the South African government and a return to the status quo ante pending the results of a commission of enquiry which was established under the chairmanship of Mr Justice Rumpff.^[1]

The mass of publicity following the publication of this proposal drew attention to the existence of a Swazi population in South Africa and to their relationship with the Swazi of Swaziland. The resident population of Swaziland itself was estimated in 1976 at 470,270 in an area of over 6000 square miles. According to the latest census figures, in 1980 there were 786,835 people described as 'Swazi' in South Africa, of whom about one third lived in the KaNgwane Bantustan. This consisted of two blocks of territory in the eastern Transvaal, one contiguous with Swaziland and one separated from it, with a combined area of about 1000 square miles. The de facto population of KaNgwane had increased from about 100,000 in 1970 to about 300,000 in 1982 as a consequence of the South African government's policy of forced relocation of black people from nominally 'white' areas. About 80 per cent of the population of the Bantustan was described as 'Swazi' and the remainder as 'Shangaan' (Tsonga), Zulu or Sotho. Some Swazi also lived under their own chiefs in the Lebowa Bantustan but the majority of those outside KaNgwane remained settled in the towns, on farms, and in so-called 'black spots' within 'white' South Africa. Many lived on the Witwatersrand, far removed from the influence of Swazi language and culture. Allowing for population increases, there must today be about 1,500,000 people described as Swazi, of whom about 55 per cent live in South Africa and about 45 per cent in Swaziland.^[2]

My main purpose will be to examine the changing relationship between the Swazi of Swaziland and those of the Transvaal from the time of the demarcation of a border between them in the late nineteenth century until the present day. After a brief examination of the creation of a single Swazi identity by the ruling

group in the context of the expansion and consolidation of political power in the pre-colonial period, I shall try to trace the changing patterns of ethnic awareness, or at least ethnic assertion, in the two halves of the divided nation, and to relate this to changes in their political and material conditions.

Members of the Swazi ruling group in Swaziland had shown a reluctance to assert claims in the Transvaal following their subordination to colonial rule, but from about 1910 they began to demonstrate a greater awareness of the influence which they might achieve in South Africa as a whole through a more assertive approach. Further shifts in their position occurred in the 1930s, when they began to lay the basis of a new cultural nationalism; in the 1960s, when they were finally able to use ethnic mobilization to re-establish a position of real political power within Swaziland; and in the 1970s, when they began to see the possibility of realizing long fermenting irredentist claims in the eastern Transvaal.

Among the South African Swazi a renewal of ethnic awareness by the chiefs and their councillors can be traced from the early 1920s. While it has been argued that the Native Administration Act of 1927 heralded a new policy of 'retribalization', there is little evidence that the Swazi of the eastern Transvaal were much affected by it. Rather, efforts at retribalization were spontaneously generated within the Swazi community and were largely ignored by the South African state until the 1950s, when there was a shift at the centre from simple segregation towards the encouragement of specific ethnic formulations of political awareness. The attempt in the 1980s to 'reunite' the Swazi, who had been so long and so fundamentally separated, was doomed to failure. Political and economic developments in South Africa and Swaziland since World War II had acted to deepen the divide between the two halves of the Swazi nation. In Swaziland an exclusivist cultural nationalism has triumphed since independence in 1968, while in South Africa those who sought to mobilize the Swazi as a political force were confronted by formidable obstacles, in the shape not only of competing ethnicities but also of a broader based South African nationalism.