ManziniHistory

Manzini History

A small town that became a small city, a capital which is like Rome.

Washington was burned to the ground by invaders, a dusty village for most of its existence, Manzini was and remains Swaziland’s convergence place, where commerce and customs, races and beliefs meet. Sometimes, these disparate elements assimilate, other times they agree to coexist within a community that is forever redefining itself, while at the same time presenting a placid exterior that is misleading, which belies the changes taking place. Without this centralized hub’s facilities and resourceful populace, the commercial, transportation and agricultural sectors of a nation would have developed in scattered and very different ways.

This is the town that set trends other Swazi urban areas followed, and the tone was established from the beginning.

Town Born in the Swazi Heartland

There was something about the central heartland of the kingdom that appealed to leaders once they came to appreciate the rolling verdure of the area’s hills and valleys. When King Mswati II moved his people northward from Old Zombodze to seek sanctuary in the caves of Mt. Mdzimba to escape the impi warriors of Shaka Zulu, he never returned his capital to the Shiselweni region. He and his descendants remained within 20 kilometres of Manzini’s current location.

When his son King Mbandzeni ascended to the Swazi throne, the colonial government setting up operations in the country chose the middleveld for the first administrative capital. They bought out a store owned by Arthur Bremer on the Mzimnene (Umzimunene) River, and called the place Bremersdorp in his honour (a condition of sale, actually). "Dorp" is an Afrikaans word meaning small agricultural town, which at that time considerably overstated the significance of the place.

The Swazis called the location Manzini. There is some debate whether the reference was to Bremer himself, and that Manzini should be translated "from the water," because all white people were said to be from the water due to the oceanic voyages that brought them from their European homes, or whether the name is correct as "on the water," a reference to the Bremer store’s riverfront location. Another suggestion is that Bremer inherited the name when he and his partner, W. Wallerstein, purchased land in the area of Chief Manzini Motsa.

What is not contested is why Bremer was there in the first place. Like many an adventurer who arrived in the territory of "Swazieland" during King Mbandzeni’s time, when a journalist named Allister Miller became royal councilor and convinced the king to award "concessions" to Europeans ranging from colossal land grants to the exclusive right to build roads, bridges and operate a postal service, Bremer acquired

a concession that allowed him to import goods into the country duty free. As a place to trade, he bought out the Rogers and Bottle store, run by two step-brothers on the Mzimnene River. The store’s location was no accident. A few years before, the step brothers ran a bottle store near the royal village of Mbekelweni. But when drunken emabutfo warriors grew rowdy once too often, Mbandzeni ordered that the store be relocated far enough away that by the time the warriors returned home, the walk would have sobered them up.

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