This is the script for my video posted on August 20, 2026. Watch it on TikTok.
Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, is a small absolute monarchy that has looked stable for decades, but it's also one of the most externally dependent countries in all of Africa. It's landlocked, surrounded on three sides by South Africa, and without South Africa it would struggle to exist at all. So why has Eswatini managed to stay independent when it needs so much external support?
People have been active here for at least 43k years, but we can trace the modern state of Eswatini to the Swazi state that emerged in the mid-18th century under King Ngwane III.
In the early 19th century, King Sobhuza I faced pressure from more powerful peoples like the Zulu and moved the Swazi north, from the Pongola River area in the south of present-day Eswatini to the Ezulwini valley in the center. He absorbed refugee clans, offered protection in exchange for loyalty, and began adopting a Zulu-style age-regiment military system that allowed him to build a defensible centralized state.
King Mswati II built that regimental system out and expanded the kingdom well beyond its modern borders. But a generation later, under Mbandzeni, the country encountered a new threat from Europeans.
British and Boer people flooded in seeking grazing, mineral, and trading rights. By the late 1880s, Mbandzeni had granted so many overlapping concessions that the kingdom had lost control over not only its territory, but rights that should really only have belonged to the government.
Mbandzeni's strategy was meant to secure Swazi independence by conceding rights rather than being annexed, but it ultimately had a similar effect to annexation. Historians still argue over how much was strategy and how much was greed. He was pulling in substantial wealth from the concessions, and he could not read the documents he was signing.
In 1894, his effort to stay independent failed. The Swaziland Convention that year handed protection and administration of Swaziland to the South African Republic, the Transvaal, without formally annexing it. The Swazi queen regent and council refused to sign, but it happened anyway.
The 1907 Partition Proclamation reserved only about a third of land for exclusive Swazi occupation, and the remaining two-thirds, including the most fertile and mineral-rich areas, went to European concessionaires and the British Crown.
Monarchs in that period gathered funds from the population to begin buying back alienated land. Sobhuza II, who reigned from 1921 to 1982, made land recovery his central strategy, creating the Lifa Fund to repurchase land not held by the British Crown.
So why wasn’t Swaziland absorbed into South Africa? Well, the South Africa Act of 1909 explicitly allowed for a possible future transfer of Swaziland and other territories to South Africa, but Britain had promised to consult the inhabitants first and kept declining South African requests. Apartheid, from 1948 onward, made a transfer even less likely. By the mid-1950s the transfer was effectively dead, and Swaziland began preparing for independence instead.
Formal independence came in 1968 under a Westminster-style constitution. Sobhuza II had opposed a constitutional monarch role, but his Imbokodvo National Movement won all elected seats in 1967. In 1973 he issued a royal proclamation repealing the constitution, dissolving parliament, banning all political parties, and assuming all legislative, executive, and judicial power under a state of emergency.
He introduced a system of governance called Tinkhundla, which the royalty describes as electing representatives on individual merit rather than through parties. In practice, chiefs control who gets nominated, and parliament is mostly advisory in nature. The king appoints the prime minister, the cabinet, ten MPs, and two thirds of the senate, and he can veto legislation or rule by decree. Tinkhundla persists to this day.
After Sobhuza II died in 1982, a power struggle broke out inside the royal establishment. The Liqoqo, the traditional Supreme Council of State led by Prince Mfanasibili, moved against the queen regents and removed Sobhuza II’s wife Dzeliwe in 1983. The struggle settled in 1986 with the coronation of the 18-year-old King Mswati III, who abolished the Liqoqo shortly thereafter.
The country's political system today operates under a 2005 constitution that technically doesn't ban political parties. Mswati III said in 2006 that there is no ban, then said in 2007 that parties will stay banned until the people say otherwise. In reality, political parties like the African United Democratic Party do exist in the country but are not authorized to contest an election.
Eswatini is also a rare diarchy, with a king alongside the Ndlovukati, or queen mother, currently Mswati's own mother. She is the traditional spiritual head of state and a theoretical counterweight to the king because she controls ritual functions, but in practice the role is largely ceremonial.
In 2018, King Mswati III renamed the country from Swaziland to Eswatini on his 50th birthday, during the 50th anniversary year of independence, framing it as a departure from the colonial name.
The king’s royal trust is technically held for the nation, but it is legally separate from the government, it’s tax exempt, and it falls outside of parliamentary oversight. It holds major stakes across the country’s industries, including 53% of the national sugar corporation, as well as hotels, beverages, dairy, and property. Mswati III’s personal wealth is heavily contested because there’s no way to audit any of it.
Absolute monarchy has not always gone well for Eswatini. In 2021, a law student was killed allegedly by the police, and the resulting protests escalated into a nationwide pro-democracy movement. The government banned demonstrations, deployed the army and police, shut down the internet, and used live ammunition. At least 46 people were killed, though activists put the number considerably higher. Two sitting MPs who backed the protests are still in prison.
Then in 2023, a prominent human rights lawyer chairing the national dialogue campaign was shot through a window in his home hours after Mswati III publicly warned that mercenaries would deal with those calling for democracy. No one has been held accountable, and the assassination chilled the movement for reform.
The Southern African Development Community, or SADC, persuaded Mswati to commit to a national dialogue after the 2021 violence, but the king used the gatherings for royal monologues instead and said there would be no political dialogue at all.
Meanwhile, many countries in SADC also belong to the Southern African Customs Union, or SACU, which gives Eswatini about 39% of its total revenue on average. 98% of SACU’s pooled customs and excise receipts come from South African trade specifically, and these are extremely volatile because they depend on regional import patterns and South Africa’s economic performance.
What this means in practice is that Eswatini’s national budget experiences severe and unpredictable shocks from year to year, disrupting their ability to plan. This is on top of the fact that the country's currency, the lilangeni, is pegged 1:1 to the South African rand, leaving it almost no independent monetary policy. They import around three quarters of their goods from South Africa, send about two thirds of their exports there, and buy roughly 70% of their electricity from South Africa’s state-owned utility Eskom.
So how does a kingdom this dependent stay independent? Partly by selling what it still owns. Eswatini is the last country in Africa to recognize Taiwan instead of China, and it takes the aid that comes with that. In 2025 it agreed to accept up to 160 deportees from the US for 5.1m dollars, in a deal that the finance minister only learned about from the payment afterward. And the monarchy has always made itself useful to whoever runs the region. In 1982, Sobhuza II signed a secret non-aggression pact with apartheid South Africa and expelled the African National Congress. Democratic South Africa returned the favor with a 2.4 billion rand loan in 2011, with no serious reform conditions attached.
So Eswatini isn't in control of its own economy, while also carrying some of the highest income inequality in the region, youth unemployment near 58%, and the highest HIV prevalence in the world at about a quarter of people aged 15 to 49. The US used to fund roughly half of the HIV response, but the 2025 aid cuts took about a fifth of the program's budget out at once. There's also no named heir and no line of succession.
With South Africa's economy slowing, SACU receipts projected to fall, the government cracking down harder on dissent, and a health system losing its largest funder, Eswatini faces some hard times ahead.
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I’m writing a book called Groundwork about the buried history beneath geopolitics. Join the waitlist to hear when it has a publisher, a cover, and a release date.