Eswatini

Eswatini is 17,364 km² — roughly the size of Wales, or a third of Slovakia — wedged between South Africa and Mozambique, and it manages to fit four distinct climate zones into a country you can drive across in three hours. It is one of the last absolute monarchies on Earth and the only one in Africa, and it is also, for a traveller, one of the friendliest and most manageable countries on the continent.

The practical case for going is wildlife without the safari-industrial complex. Mlilwane has no large predators, so you walk, cycle and ride horses among zebra, warthog and antelope with nothing between you and them. Hlane has lion, elephant and white rhino at a fraction of Kruger prices. Mkhaya is one of the best places in Africa to see black rhino on foot. All three are run by the same non-profit trust, and all three are an hour or two from each other.

The cultural case is that Swazi tradition is living rather than performed. The Umhlanga reed dance in August and September and the Incwala kingship ceremony around the December solstice are the real thing, attended by tens of thousands of Swazis for reasons that have nothing to do with tourism. You are welcome at both, within rules that are taken seriously.

The honest counterweight is the politics. King Mswati III has ruled since 1986 with no legally functioning opposition; political parties have been banned from contesting elections since 1973. Protests in 2021 were put down with dozens of deaths. Eswatini also has one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world, though its treatment programme is genuinely one of Africa's success stories. None of this makes the country dangerous to visit. All of it is worth knowing before you go.

On 19 April 2018, on his fiftieth birthday and the fiftieth anniversary of independence, King Mswati III announced that Swaziland would henceforth be the Kingdom of Eswatini — Umbuso weSwatini, "land of the Swazis". The stated reason was that "Swaziland" was a colonial hybrid and that people abroad kept confusing it with Switzerland.

Eswatini is a staircase running east. It drops from the highveld at 1,000–1,800 m through the middleveld and lowveld to the Lubombo escarpment on the Mozambican border, and each step is a different climate, different vegetation and different farming. That vertical range in a country 200 km long is what makes it interesting.

Everything is within a couple of hours. Mbabane to Manzini is 35 km; Mbabane to Hlane about 130 km; the whole country is 200 km north to south and 130 km east to west. The main road, the MR3, runs from the South African border at Ngwenya through Mbabane and Manzini to the lowveld.

The Swazi state was built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Dlamini dynasty, which moved north from what is now southern Mozambique and absorbed the Nguni and Sotho clans it found. Sobhuza I consolidated the kingdom in the 1820s during the upheavals of the mfecane, and Mswati II — from whom the country takes its name — expanded it dramatically in the mid-century into one of the strongest states in the region.

The kingdom's problem was that it sat between the Zulu, the Boer republics and the British, and it survived by playing them off against each other. After gold was found in the 1880s, King Mbandzeni granted a flood of concessions to European prospectors — grazing, mining, trading, even the right to collect customs — and by the time anyone counted, concessions covered more of the country than there was country.

Britain and the Transvaal each administered Eswatini at different points; after the Second Boer War it became a British High Commission Territory in 1903. The 1907 land partition assigned roughly two-thirds of the country to white settlers, and the recovery of that land became the central project of Swazi politics for the next sixty years — pursued not by rebellion but by buying it back, with cattle, levies and royal funds.

Sobhuza II came to the throne in 1921 as a minor and reigned until 1982 — at 82 years, the longest verified reign of any monarch in history. He led the delegations to London, negotiated independence, and is the reason the monarchy emerged from colonialism strengthened rather than sidelined.

Independence came on 6 September 1968, with a Westminster-style constitution, a parliament and political parties. It lasted five years. In April 1973, after the opposition NNLC won three seats, Sobhuza II repealed the constitution by decree, banned all political parties, dissolved parliament and assumed supreme power — describing the imported constitution as unsuited to the Swazi way of life.

Eswatini is governed by a king with executive, legislative and judicial authority — the last absolute monarchy in Africa and one of a handful left anywhere. Understanding how it works, and how Swazis actually talk about it, is the single most useful piece of context you can arrive with.

The Umhlanga is the largest cultural event in the country: over eight days in late August or early September, tens of thousands of unmarried Swazi women and girls cut reeds, carry them to the Queen Mother's royal village at Ludzidzini, and dance before the royal family. It is the biggest gathering of its kind in Africa.

Incwala is the most sacred ceremony in the Swazi year — a first-fruits and kingship ritual held around the December solstice, running for several weeks and culminating in a few days that only take place when there is a king. It cannot be held during an interregnum, which tells you what it is actually about.

Mbabane is a small hill town of around 95,000 at 1,150 m, and it is not the reason anyone comes to Eswatini. It is pleasant, cool, safe by regional standards, and useful — banks, supermarkets, a market, and the road down into Ezulwini where nearly everything else is.

The Ezulwini valley — "place of heaven" — runs from Mbabane down to Lobamba and holds the great majority of what a visitor actually does in Eswatini: the royal capital, the museum, the craft industry, the hotels and the country's easiest wildlife.

Manzini is the country's largest urban area and its commercial hub — busier, hotter and less scenic than Mbabane, and the place to see Eswatini as Swazis use it rather than as visitors do.

Eswatini's oldest protected area and the reason the country has any wildlife left. In the 1950s Ted Reilly turned his family farm in the Ezulwini valley into a sanctuary at a point when almost everything larger than a duiker had been shot out of the country. He then restocked Eswatini from it.

The two lowveld reserves are where the big animals are, and between them they hold both African rhino species. Eswatini's anti-poaching record is one of the toughest on the continent — the country lost very few rhinos through the worst of the 2010s poaching wave, and the reason is a legal regime and a ranger force that both take it extremely seriously.

Malolotja is 18,000 hectares of montane grassland, gorge and waterfall in the north-western highveld, and it is the best hiking country in the region — 200 km of trails, almost no other people, and the country's highest waterfall.

Six kilometres from Mbabane sits a granite dome roughly three billion years old — among the oldest exposed rock on the planet, and by most counts the largest exposed granite pluton in the world after Australia's Uluru. Almost nobody outside Eswatini has heard of it.

The eastern third of the country is hot bushveld and irrigated sugar cane, and it is the least-visited and most agricultural part of Eswatini. It is also where the country's economy actually sits: sugar is the largest export and the biggest employer.

Eswatini lost nearly all its large mammals to hunting by the mid-twentieth century and got them back deliberately, animal by animal, largely through one family's stubbornness. It is one of the clearest conservation restoration stories in Africa and it is not widely known.

Eswatini is unusually homogeneous — around 1.24 million people, almost entirely Swazi, speaking one language, with one monarchy and one set of ceremonies. That homogeneity is the country's great social asset and the reason its politics has never fractured on ethnic lines.

The official languages are siSwati and English, and both are genuinely used — English is the language of government, business and secondary education, and you will have no difficulty travelling with it alone. Learning ten words of siSwati will nonetheless change how the trip goes.

Swazi cooking is southern African staple food — maize, beans, greens, pumpkin, sour milk and meat when there is meat — and it is starch-centred, mild and filling rather than complex. Restaurant food in Ezulwini and Mbabane is mostly South African, so the traditional dishes take some seeking out.

What to look for

Beer, home-brew and — for a few weeks a year — an entire national season built around a wild fruit. Eswatini also produces the fruit that goes into one of the world's best-selling cream liqueurs, which most people drinking it have no idea about.

Eswatini's handicraft sector is unusually well organised — a network of fair-trade cooperatives and social enterprises, most of them employing rural women, producing goods that are exported worldwide. Buying here is the most efficient way for tourist money to reach a household directly.

Southern-hemisphere seasons, and four climates stacked by altitude. The rule is simple: May to September is dry, cool and the best time to be here for both wildlife and hiking; October to April is the wet summer, hot in the lowveld and malarial there.

Almost everyone arrives overland from South Africa. King Mswati III International (SHO) at Sikhuphe in the lowveld is a large, modern and famously underused airport, served by a handful of regional flights.

There is no fast way. From Prague the realistic route is a flight to Johannesburg — usually one stop via a Gulf hub, Istanbul, Frankfurt or Amsterdam — and then either the short hop to Eswatini or, more commonly, a hire car across the border. Total travel time is 16 to 24 hours.

Small, easy and much less complicated than its neighbours. English is official, the roads are good, distances are tiny, and the biggest practical decision you make is whether to hire a car — the answer is yes.

Cheap by the standards of southern African safari countries and roughly comparable to South Africa for everyday costs. The wildlife in particular is a fraction of what the equivalent costs in Botswana or the private Kruger reserves.

Eswatini is considerably safer for a visitor than its large neighbour, and violent crime against tourists is uncommon. The real risks are the roads, the health picture, and — occasionally — political unrest that has nothing to do with you but that you should not walk into.

Eswatini has among the highest adult HIV prevalence rates in the world — roughly a quarter of adults aged 15 to 49 are living with HIV. It is also, and this matters as much, the site of one of the most effective national treatment responses anywhere, and the country reached and passed the UNAIDS 95-95-95 targets ahead of almost everyone.

Eswatini is the easiest country in southern Africa to underrate, because it is small, it is surrounded by South Africa, and most people pass through it on the way to Kruger or the Mozambican coast. Two days is what it usually gets. Give it four and it becomes one of the best parts of the trip.

What makes it worth the days is that the wildlife here is not behind glass. At Mlilwane you cycle among zebra. At Hlane you eat dinner by lamplight while a rhino drinks twenty metres away with nothing between you. At Mkhaya you walk up to black rhino on foot, and there are not many places left on Earth where that sentence is true. It costs a small fraction of what the equivalent costs in Botswana, and the people running it have been at it for sixty years.

Do the crafts properly, too. Swazi Candles, Gone Rural, Ngwenya Glass and the Manzini market are not a tourist tax — they are among the largest employers of rural women in the country, and the money you spend there lands closer to a household than anything else you will do. Buy more than you meant to.

And be a thoughtful guest about the politics. This is a place where people are generous, funny and immediately warm, and where a good many of them cannot say out loud what they think about how it is governed. Do not put them in that position to satisfy your curiosity. Read about the 2021 protests and Thulani Maseko's killing before you come, keep your camera away from anything official, and let people tell you what they choose to.

— Radim Kaufmann