Labotsibeni Mdluli

Labotsibeni Mdluli ruled Swaziland as queen regent for twenty-two years across the period in which it lost and partly recovered its land, and she is the reason the monarchy survived it. She was the wife of King Mbandzeni and became Ndlovukati, the queen mother, on the death of her son Bhunu in 1899; she then governed for her infant grandson Sobhuza II until his majority in 1921. The regency covered the South African War, the transfer of Swaziland from Transvaal oversight to British protection, and the land partition of 1907, in which roughly two-thirds of the country was allotted to white settlers under concessions granted by Mbandzeni in the 1880s to men who had misrepresented what they were obtaining. Her response was neither armed resistance, which would have ended the kingdom, nor acceptance. She organised a national fund, the Lifa Fund, to which Swazi men working in the South African mines contributed part of their wages, and used it to buy land back. She sent a delegation to London in 1922 to petition the King directly, and though it achieved nothing legally it established the claim. She also insisted on education, founding the Zombodze national school and sending Sobhuza to it, on the argument that the Swazi would need people who could read the documents being put in front of them. She handed power to Sobhuza in 1921 and died four years later. She was born into the Mdluli clan and was known as Gwamile, meaning the indomitable one, a name that outlasted her own. The Lifa Fund continued after her death and land purchases under it went on into the 1940s. Swaziland reached independence in 1968 with its monarchy intact, alone among the southern African kingdoms, which is the practical result of the choices she made during the partition. Her grandson Sobhuza went on to reign for sixty-one years, the longest documented reign of any monarch.

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