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By Ayanda Dlamini | 2020-08-09
As our neighboring country South Africa is celebrating women’s month, today we decided to pay a special tribute to the woman of steel, a woman who birth Eswatini, a woman who formed the African National Congress ( ANC) during her reign; Queen Labotsibeni ( Gwamile).
As a woman, Gwamile played a critical role in the making of the Eswatini nation. Clearly, the role of individuals in the making of a nation is a complex one; but there is no doubt that Labotsibeni provided much needed leadership to the Eswatini nation and that the British colonial officials.
While compiling this Issue, while researching about Gwamile, we discovered that this woman offered the much-needed financial muscle to support SANNC (now ANC) activities.
She was also a very astute entrepreneur who treated this exercise as a business decision to partner with Seme and company thus making her a shareholder and Seme a managing director of Abantu-Batho – a limited liability company.
As an oralate stateswoman she understood the power of the printed word and ensured that Abantu-Batho staff members report on bread and butter issues happening in Eswatini and other parts of southern Africa for the world to learn about beyond continental boundaries. During the First World War, our research and archives states that Queen Labotsibeni purchased an aircraft worth £1000 for Britain in support of its war efforts. She insisted the aircraft carry her name in order to reflect and acknowledge the role played by women in the First World War.
The 25 April 1918 issue of Abantu-Batho sang her praises in commending “Ndlovukazi and the people of Eswatini for the loyalty and devotion to the British Crown”.
When she passed on in 1925 there was a heavy rain that led to flood in some parts of South Africa and Swaziland. She was a rain-maker. She was reputed to have said, “When I want water, I make the rain myself”
This is by doubt that she is still celebrated even today in both countries; Eswatini and South Africa.
How Gwamile initiated, moulded and coordinated change in Eswatini
There is considerable resonance between the collective consciousness of the Emaswati and scholars that LaMdluli played an important role in reducing the worst colonial excesses in Swaziland from the 1890s until her death.
One of the early critical analyses of history in Eswatini considered LaMdluli an ‘intelligent and articulate’ commanding figure who was ‘self-confident and politically astute.
She was not prone to passivity or submission to white authority and this probably accounts for Coryndon’s hasty, and consequently unfair, judgment of her character.’
Her reign also left a legacy which remained an important foundation for Swazi political and economic developments throughout the twentieth century.
Labotsibeni’s ascension to the throne was rather atypical as Swati traditional laws did not allow a woman in her situation to rule. Second, her clan, Mdluli, was not next in line to rule the country. In spite of this, she was chosen because of “her outstanding intelligence, ability and character and experience.”
Also known as Gwamile (meaning the indomitable one) she was acknowledged by many representatives of Britain as one of the cleverest rulers in Africa, a shrewd diplomat who bravely led and defended Swaziland.
During her reign she tried to regain tracts of land that her husband had lost to European settlers by raising 40 000 pounds to buy it back, however she was not successful.
Her campaign coincided with protests against South Africa’s 1913 Natives’ Land Act.
In solidarity, Labotsibeni contributed to the South African Native National Congress (SANNC) 1914 delegation to Britain to protest the act.
In 1921 she and Crown Prince Sobhuza, later King Sobhuza II, financed and co-founded the Abantu-Batho newspaper, the mouthpiece of the SANNC. A strong African nationalist, the Regent had registered the infant Prince Sobhuza as a member of the ANC at its inception in 1912.
A rainmaker and one of the richest women in South Africa, she was not known to wear European clothes although the Queen of England is said to have sent her many.
This was perhaps a sign of her Africanism and being grounded in tradition. She died at the age of 80.
ABOUT QUEEN LABOTSIBENI
Queen Labotsibeni had earlier made contact with Pixley kalsaka Seme, who had recently returned as a lawyer from the United States and Britain.
He drafted a petition for the Swazi council in 1912, and in the same year Queen Labotsibeni provided almost all the capital for Seme's paper, Abantu-Batho, which the royal family continued to support until its collapse in the late 1920s. It was founded in connection with the South African Natives' National Congress which held its first meeting in January 1912.
The congress was seen by its founders, among whom Pixley Seme was a prime mover, as a response to Union. Its aim was to foster the unity of the 'natives' and to combat 'tribalism'. The South African 'tribes' were not, however, seen in themselves as an impediment to unity but as the building blocks from which unity could be constructed.
The primary interest of the Queen and council in the congress was undoubtedly in the campaign against the Land Act. They had embarked on a campaign to buy back concession land from its holders and therefore had a special interest in the restrictions on purchase which it imposed.
The extension of the terms of the Act to Eswatini would bring an end to their schemes. Prince Malunge, together with Benjamin Nxumalo, the brother of the young Queen Mother Lomawa, and uncle of Sobhuza, played an active part in the early meetings of the congress, as did Josiah Vilakazi, secretary to Queen Labotsibeni. When Prince Malunge attended the special congress held in 1914 at Kimberley to protest against the Land Act, he was treated as the most distinguished delegate.
The premature death of Prince Malunge in 1915, which was publicly mourned by congress leaders J.L. Dube, Pixley Seme and Sol Plaatje, did not end the assertion of a wider South African role by the royal house. In 1916 Cleopas Kunene, one of the first editors of Abantu-Batho and a member of the Swazi deputation to England in 1894, organized an extravagant reception in Johannesburg for Prince Sobhuza who was on his way to school at Lovedale.
A few years later, in 1921, Sobhuza was to buy six stands and a house in Sophiatown which became a meeting place for Emaswati in Johannesburg.
The first serious attempt at intervention by the Queen on behalf of the Transvaal Swazi came in 1918 in connection with the implementation of the section of the Land Act which provided for the creation of additional reserves. Queen Labotsibeni heard in January 1918 that the Eastern Transvaal Land Committee was seeking evidence and asked the Resident Commissioner in Eswatini to inform it that it was 'my wish as well as the wish of all the Swazi living in the Transvaal' that they be given 'a strip of land [from] the Barberton line right down to the Pongola river near Chief Sithambe'.
The High Commissioner, Lord Buxton, indicated that her views would be put to the committee, but if they were, they can have had little impact as there was no question of any highveld area in the eastern Transvaal being set aside as reserve.
Evidence was also given to the committee at Ermelo by a delegation of the South African Natives' National Congress, most of whom were Swazi, and described themselves as such, and one of whom, Joseph Hlubi, had close ties with the royal house. They expressed their desire to remain on the highveld, whether in reserves or not, and protested vigorously at the proposal contained in the Native Administration Bill to charge licence fees for squatters and labour tenants in a drive to reduce the highveld population to the status of full-time servants or to force them to move into lowveld reserves.
The committee made an impassioned plea for a gradualist approach. It stressed the need for development in new reserves and pointed out in prophetic language that: 'to transport Natives even from the exiguous conveniences of settled life in non-Native areas suddenly and in large masses to areas which they still have to prepare before they can exist in them would be dangerous in the extreme'.
The Botha government withdrew the bill, as, faced with the conflicting claims for labour from highveld farmers and the mining companies, it was unable to get a majority for it. The same conflict ensured that the scheduling of reserves was indefinitely delayed.
Meanwhile in 1919 the Queen and council made one further attempt to intervene on behalf of their 'subjects' in the Transvaal. In a trenchant petition, presumably drafted by Seme and clearly influenced by the tone of Wilson's Fourteen Points, they demanded among other things the recognition of 'the independence of Eswatini with its own sovereign power' and the provision of land for the Swazi in the districts of Barberton, Carolina, Ermelo, Piet Relief, and Wakkerstroom. The petition referred for the first time to what would be a recurring theme: promises allegedly contained in the conventions of 1881 and 1884 that 'locations' would be established for the Swazi in the eastern Transvaal who were said to be living under a 'veiled form of slavery'. The responses to this petition and to petitions in 1921 and 1922 which sought the recognition of Sobhuza as king of Eswatini on both sides of the border were negative.
In the years following World War I, the position of Eswatini in the eastern Transvaal deteriorated seriously. Even before the war, pressure on squatters on the highveld had begun to increase as a result of the subdivision of farms and the increase of commercial farming. Chiefs with their retainers and often large herds of stock were especially vulnerable.
Early in 1914 the Mbhuleni royal village had set off on the first of a long series of migrations. It was to move five times by 1949. After the war similar pressures began increasingly to be felt in the Barberton district as a result of the sale or lease of land to new settlers. These pressures resulted not only in frequent evictions, but also in a deterioration in the terms which squatters could obtain from the landlord. Many squatters were forced to become labour tenants, and many labour tenants had to become full-time servants at a minimal wage.
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