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Sobhuza II championed the cause of retrieving Swazi expropriated by Europeans, which had begun in the nineteenth century and this made him popular among the Swazi’s. A succession of European settlers that had started or rising in Swaziland from the 1840’s resulted in the expropriation of large tracts of land. The Swazi people generally displaced and were forced then to relocate into a patchwork of 32 reserves that came to be known as Swazi Nation Land held in communal tenure.
On ascending the throne and apart from his credentials as a traditional ruler, but being as well western educated he had a good exposure to the rudiments of modern governance, he took up the issue of land expropriation with the British by sending deputations to London but had little success. After World War II , he managed to organise the repurchase from Europeans of over 2,251,000 acres of land out of 4,280,000, this land became Swazi owned and was referred to as the Swazi Nation Land.
The struggle of the monarch to recover Swazi land from outsiders, coupled with the fact that the Sobhuza and his chiefs controlled one-third of the country’s land space- The Swazi Nation Land had placed him in a strong position and made him an important central figure in colonial Swaziland and why the Swazi people generally retained an emotional attachment to him. Pictured below is a portrait of Sobhuza II in 1921 when his grandmother abdicated in his favour as leader of the Swazi Nation. (ascended the throne on the 22 December 1921).
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Sobhuza worked closely with his traditional council the Liqoqo which was composed of about 60 hereditary chiefs and nobles, with a few commoners. Swaziland had a national body that was roughly equivalent of a parliament called Libandla, which met once a year and was attended by any adult male. Taken together, these traditional councils found the SNC, which used to meet periodically with the representatives of the British government when the need arose. Source: A Constitutional History of the Kingdom of Eswatini (Swaziland) 1960 – 1982 by Mlengiwe Portia Dlamini.
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A great leader that showed his love in action for people and country indeed.
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