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 Bayly 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.

And thus was Manzini born. Bremer prospered---he used his store as a wholesaler to supply goods to other trading posts, and nearby he built a corrugated iron hotel. From the beginning, the Manzini area with its proximity to the royal kraal at Mbekelweni was recognised as a central location from which other parts of the country radiated like spokes from a central hub. Visitors occupied rooms in Bremer’s hotel that overlooked a veld where few trees grew beyond the nettles and ferns of the river bank. The hotel was the "somewhere" in the middle of "nowhere," drawing concession seekers and the first legendary characters who would give the settlement its Wild West reputation.

Two of these characters were Bob McNab and Charlie du Pont. McNab had been driven out of South African territory when his occupation as cattle thief proved too troublesome for other settlers. He continued his outlaw ways in Swaziland, but King Mbandzeni was inclined to show him tolerance after McNab prevented an outbreak of a dreaded smallpox epidemic by expeditiously shooting four native Mozambicans suffering from the disease who tried to sneak into the country past his shack in the Lubombo.

McNab’s rival was a French settler, Charles du Pont, who had ingratiated his way into the tribe by marrying 12 Swazi wives, while McNab never bothered to wed his succession of Swazi girlfriends. Du Pont was accused of theft, and it was McNab who was asked by the territorial council to bring him in. Meeting McNab at the door of his house, Du Pont used the opportunity of a handshake to pull McNab inside, and shoot him with a gun he held behind his back. McNab recovered, but du Pont was not through with him for having the temerity of trying to arrest him.

The showdown occurred at Bremer’s hotel. McNab arrived first, brandishing a gun. He declared the doom awaiting du Pont when he found him. Others at the bar pacified McNab by plying him with liquor until he was so drunk he passed out. They took away his gun, and put him to bed. Du Pont arrived, having heard McNab was there. He also waved a gun, with accompanying threats against his rival. His listeners humoured him, until they could also get him drunk. They then disarmed him, undressed him, and put him in the same bed as McNab.

The story is confirmed by various historical accounts, which unfortunately do not say what transpired the next morning when the two naked, unarmed enemies woke up in the same bed together.

The First Swaziland Capital

A similar uneasy rivalry was the undoing of the White Committee, which King Mbandzeni permitted to govern the affairs of Europeans in 1887. 25 members met at Bremer’s Hotel, and quibbled so incessantly that the British and Transvaal governments, whose citizens had settled in Swaziland, convinced King Bhunu, who was installed in 1889 upon the death of his father King Mbandzeni, to permit a new administrative authority. The so-called Triumvirate Government, headed by Colonel Richard Martin, on hand to secure British interests, D.J. Esselen as the representative of the Transvaal Republic and its Afrikaner citizens in Swaziland, and Theophilus Shepstone, King Mbandzeni’s councilor as Swazi representative, also conducted business out of Bremer’s Hotel, which the administrative government purchased, along with his other land holdings.

Transvaal President Kruger was delighted to acquire Swaziland as his protectorate in 1894 after negotiations with the British, because he wanted to construct a railway line to transport goods from Pretoria to Richard’s Bay. He was considerably put out when the British in 1895 annexed Swazi territory along the Indian Ocean from the Mozambique border southward, blocking the railway route. Swazis were even more irate by the land confiscation, a matter still unsettled at the dawn of the 21st century. With no use for Swaziland as a route to the sea, but required by treaty to administer the place, the Transvaal retained Bremersdorp as the administrative capital of its protectorate.

To any capital gravitates a wide variety of humanity seeking opportunities and influence, and in need of accommodation, goods and services. Some stayed as permanent settlers. Town plots could be purchased by private owners when Pretoria declared Bremersdorp a township in 1898. One by one, small wooden homes were erected in the "dorp," dotting the veld in a haphazard fashion, but decorated with trellises of bougainvillea to soften their ramshackle appearance. With government now occupying Bremer’s old place, an International Hotel went up. Postal service began in 1891. A branch of the National Bank was opened in 1897 in the same building where government offices were located.

On June 5 that year, Allister Miller began a weekly broadsheet he called the Times of Swaziland, using a second-hand printing press brought from Lorenco Marques, the capital of the Portuguese territory to the northeast. The newspaper’s first advert, on the front page, read "International Hotel/First-Class Cuisine/Finest Wines and Spirits Only Kept/R. Lewis, Proprietor." Inside was a tribute to Arthur Bremer, who had just retired from his post as chairman of the Mercantile Association due to ill health. Grandly, Miller wrote, "His little trading station on the Umzimunene blossomed into a township, and from that time his name has been associated with every forward move that has marked the advance of this territory."

The advancements of seven years included a court house and goal, a post and telegraph office, and the studio of a photographer who documented the buildings, people, and the town’s first social entertainments. One of these diversions was a human chess game conducted on a giant board painted on the ground, with men, women and children dressed as playing pieces ordered to move across squares by the players.

What a few dozen residents now considered home was the source of scorn for one contemporary traveler, who left an account that begins with an understatement before turning supremely sarcastic. "Bremersdorp is the capital of Swaziland, yet it is not the largest capital I have visited. It is irregularly built, and there is room between most of the buildings for many more. The state of the streets is good in dry weather, but when it rains, it is regular stickfest and ruination to boots. The government buildings were in former times a hotel. The outside is old and mean and the accommodation meagre. The travellers’ International Hotel has plenty of room, particularly for improvement. All that is first class are the charges. There is really not an imposing building in the place. Most are wooden and iron structures---many are of the shanty order. There are three stores. They do good business, and it is said that the proprietors are making fortunes. This is very probably from the charges."

In 1890, DJA Danford made a sketch of the first town plan. His proposed street system bore a similarity to what was eventually built decades later. Included was a centrally-located park where Jubilee Park is today, renamed Freedom Square after Independence but still referred to by some Manzini residents by its original name that dates to 1897, when a major celebration featuring fireworks, dancing, entertainment and food was held at the spot in honour of the Diamond Jubilee commemorating the 60th year of the reign Britain’s Queen Victoria.

More photographs of the day show a small community of white people, posing before a new clapboard school, a church, a trading store where leopard skins hung from a wooden porch. Into these pictures appear Swazis in traditional attire, tentatively wandering into frame before wandered out again to their emakhaya homes. But the village of Bremersdorp was not irrelevant to Swazis’ lives. There was resentment of new taxes imposed upon them by the administrative government. In 1898, every Swazi was made to pay a ten shilling hut tax and a sixpence road tax. Adding to this burden, just two years before, 90% of the nation’s cattle population had been exterminated by a plague of rinderpest, throwing into ruin the traditional economy where cows were currency.

A King on Trial

Swazis detected malicious supernatural forces at work, and a number of smelling out rituals were conducted throughout the land to find the perpetrators many people felt were bringing misfortune to the Swazi nation Events culminated in the killing of King Bhunu’s chief indvuna, Mbhabha Nsibandze, and his two attendants, on 9 April 1898.

The colonial government sought to investigate Bhunu’s role in the crimes, but not necessarily to seek justice over the deaths. President Kruger wanted to abolish the office of paramount chief, as the Swazi king was known throughout the colonial era, and British intelligence believed Bhunu was in league with Zulu King Dinizulu to foment an anti-white uprising. The intelligence reports were false, but the authorities’ demand that Bhunu come to Bremersdorp for a hearing nearly resulted in the feared uprising. When the king arrived on Saturday morning, 21 May, 1899, 2 000 warriors accompanied him, carrying spears, sticks and shields, and singing the praises of Bhunu with such vigour the town people thought they were listening to war cries.

Bhunu testified that Nsibandze had been killed because he was a threat to the Swazi nation. This was enough for the Transvaal government to decide to put the king on trial, although the British questioned their jurisdictional right to do so. In Bremer’s old hotel (a vacant lot today on the corner of Nkhoseluhlaza and Sandlane Streets), Bhunu was tried for murder on Monday, 5 September. The prosecution was unable to establish what the king’s role was in the men’s murders. All testimony of Swazi witnesses indicated a collective responsibility of a nation that perceived itself to be threatened. Bhunu was acquitted of the crime, but he was given a heavy fine for permitted public violence, and saddled with the trial’s costs.

A year later, Bhunu, King Ngwane V, was dead himself. On 10 December, while performing the sacred Incwala ceremony that commences every Swazi summer, the king, who was only in his 20s, died suddenly. His death was kept secret, for if the people heard of it, the sound of weeping and mourning would replace the sombre scared Incwala songs. Then as now, if the pageant were to be interrupted, the ancestral spirits would not be successfully petitioned, and misfortune would result. Queen Mother Labotsibeni quickly stepped in to perform in Bhunu’s place, while priests from the Ngwenya clan carried out the traditional embalming of Bhunu’s body. He was buried at Mt. Mdzimba, near his father Mbandzeni.

A few months earlier, while staying at Mdzimba "amongst the lizards," Bhunu was brought the news that a new prince had been born to him, of his queen Lomawa. Bhunu named his son Nkhontfojeni, after a species of lizard. But the events of 1899 inspired the prince’s grandmother Labotsibeni to give him a second name, Mona, meaning "jealousy." Jealousy was in the air: among British and Boers about to plunge the territory into war, among Europeans and Swazis, and throughout the royal court. By the name Mona the prince was generally known, until the day 22 years later when he was installed as King Sobhuza II, a monarch who was to have a special affinity for the town of Bremersdorp/Manzini.

Village Abandoned

At the time of Bhunu’s death, the population of the Swazi nation stood between 40 000 and 50 000. A few months before, Europeans numbered 1 400. But now, there were no white people to be found.

In October, hostilities broke out between the British Empire and the Boer Republic of South Africa. Fearing that warfare might spill over into Swaziland, Johannes Krogh, the special commissioner for Swaziland appointed four years earlier by the Transvaal Republic, ordered all Europeans out of the country. Ironically, just three weeks before he had laid the foundation stone for new government offices, on the site of today’s New George Hotel. Krogh would later be remembered when Manzini’s main west to east artery, General Street (also designated with the Afrikaans spelling Generaal Straat) was renamed from its original commemoration of General Piet Joubert, who in 1895 had been sent by the Transvaal Republic to officially recognise the kingship of Ingwenyama Bhunu. When Bhunu was in Natal prior to his trial, Joubert arrived to calm the situation through talks with Indlovukazi Gwamile. Incidentally, a cross street intersecting Nkhoseluhlaza at today’s Bhunu Mall, Sandlane Street, was named after the long-reigning chief indvuna, Sandlane Zwane, who was assassinated for his alleged involvement in a plot to kill King Mbandzeni.

Most Europeans of Bremersdorp headed for the Portuguese territory to get out of the line of fire. It was thought that some people buried money and valuable objects in the ground before fleeing, a belief that evolved into legends of buried treasure in the town.

Upon his departure, Commandant-General Piet Joubert left a letter with King Bhunu: "And now, Ubhunu, the Government places Swaziland under your care, and trusts that you will act accordingly. Whereupon I want to advise you, purely as a friend, to rule Swaziland well and in peace. This is the advice of a sincere friend of the Umswazi, of Mbandzeni, and also of Ubhunu."

Bremersdorp was a ghost town. The Times of Swaziland did not report the death of King Bhunu, because there was no longer a newspaper. The vault of the National Bank had been emptied of its contents before it was locked. Occasional army patrols passed through, but within weeks the village was reverting to veld. Weeds sprouted in the gardens of shuttered homes, and tall grass reclaimed dirt streets. No laughter or music emerged from the bar of the International Hotel. The church was silent as a tomb.

From time to time, Swazi warrior scouts looked down at the abandoned village, and reported to Queen Regent Labotsibeni at Zombodze. Occasional commando raids in Swaziland and cross-border skirmishes never disturbed the place. Then, in July, 1901, Labotsibeni’s scouts reported to her that Boer General Tobias Smuts was headed for Bremersdorp. A British garrison had posted itself in the village, and she wished to send a word of warning, but she was overruled by royal councilors who advised non-intervention.

Arriving at Bremersdorp, Smuts captured 33 men under the command of Ludwig Steinacher, a Prussian army officer working for the British. Five men were wounded in the skirmish, but no one was killed. Then, wantonly, Smuts ordered the village to be burned. He was not under orders to do so, and the destruction of the town cost him his job. The International Hotel reportedly exploded like a tinderbox. The school, bank, photographer’s studio, newspaper office, general dealers, homes---the smoke of their fires blackened the middleveld skies, and their embers lit up the night.

When she heard of Bremersdorp’s destruction from the emabutfo scouts who had observed from the hills, Queen Regent Labotsibeni lowered her head, and wept.

From the Ashes: A New Identity

The following May, the British defeated their rivals, and took over the two Boer Republics along with their Swaziland protectorate. With Bremersdorp in ashes, the mountain-top hamlet of Mbabane, created in 1888 when an ex-soldier named Bill Wells set up a shop on land belonging to Chief Mbabane Kunene, was chosen as the new administrative capital. A Bremersdorp resident, Michael Coates, an acquaintance of Mohandas Gandhi during the Indian leader’s South African days, and whose property was developed into the upper middle-class homes of Coates Valley east of downtown in the 1960s, led a 1905 delegation to urge the British to retain Bremersdorp as administrative capital. But the new authorities preferred the cold, misty highveld to Bremersdorp’s California-like climate, and they also feared the old capital lay too close to the lowveld malaria belt.

The historic choice did not result in the abandonment of Bremersdorp. Rather, the town was rebuilt, and devoted its attention to commercial concerns that truly seemed its reason for being. Agriculture, not bureaucracy, business and not ministries would be the reason for the town’s existence. Its centralised location, wide-open spaces promising unlimited development, and well-watered arable land made inevitable the town’s resurgence, Phoenix-like from the ashes of war.

As if to proclaim its new identity, Bremersdorp launched in 1911, just five years after Swaziland was declared a British Protectorate, the Swaziland Agricultural Show, which for decades would be the foremost entertainment and commercial celebration in the kingdom. The Swaziland Farmers Association, which chose Bremersdorp as its national headquarters the year before, organised the event. Initially, the fair was designed as a showcase for locally-grown vegetables, animal stock, and other farm goods. But soon Swazi handicrafts were featured, purchased by visitors in the genesis of the nation’s tourism industry.

In the fields surrounding the town, farmers were turning to maize, the Swazi staple food introduced during King Mswati II’s reign, as a commercial crop. Cattle, pigs and goats were everywhere, frequently grazing in the heart of town, and prompting home owners to erect white picket fences to protect their flower gardens.

The fair grounds were along the Mzimnene River where they remain today, just across a narrow bridge that commenced the town’s only real street, President Street. The eponymous President was Pretorius, whose name lives on as the South African capital Pretoria. But he was displaced in Manzini by a commemoration of King Bhunu when his street was renamed Ngwane at Independence.

The decision to name the main street after Pretorius showed the original residents’ ties to the Transvaal. The rebuilt structures of the town were still primarily wooden shacks with galvinised iron roofs, interspersed with what were little more than mud huts. But more substantial homes were also going up along dirt paths extending south and north from President Street. These were done in a Cape Dutch style of decorative architecture that would later achieve its greatest usage in the southern towns of Hlatikhulu and Goedgegun (Nhlangano).

Bremersdorp was a white town where no Swazis lived but for those employed on a temporary basis as domestic servants, gardeners, shop and hotel labour. With the town still in its infancy, labour needs were few. Bremersdorp was officially awarded township status in 1918, with boundaries identical to those of the Bremersdorp township declared in 1897 by Transvaal authorities, and it was proclaimed an urban area in 1925 under a 1912 Urban Areas Proclamation that declared, "The towns are to be freed from any right of any Africans of Swaziland to reside in them." Ipso facto racial segregation in Swaziland would persist throughout the colonial era, condoned by authorities at the bequest of Urban Areas Advisory Committees, and observed by most residents of all races as an unquestioned way of life.

But while Queen Regent Labotsibeni, ruling with the assistance of her son Prince Malunge (whose name would be attached to the main exhibition hall of Manzini’s International Trade Fair complex), watched helplessly as Britain partitioned the nation in 1907, leaving Swazis with rights to only one-third of their land, and then confiscated the kingdom’s mineral rights, Swazi authorities recognised a greater peril at possible incorporation into South Africa. The Native Land Act of 1913 stripped South African Swazis and other non-white South Africans of their human rights. In Swaziland, British authorities never established a similar apartheid policy.

But the country lapsed into a four decade-long torpor that saw no large-scale development and little initiative shown by colonial authorities to transform Swaziland from a sleepy backwater. The feeling was that this smallest of the British High Commission territories would eventually be incorporated into the Union of South Africa. Swaziland was run from the High Commissioner’s office in Pretoria, with a chain of command devolving to a District Commissioner in Bremersdorp.

They Call It "The Hub"

After the first world war, when both Swazis and white residents (Swazilanders as they were known) volunteered for service, Manzini became the first Swazi town to be electrified. Mickey Reilly, the manager of a tin mine at Mlilwane owned by the Bailey Group of Johannesburg, purchased the 50 kva turbine that had been used to power the mine’s electrical magnets for mineral separation. Reilly built a plant on the Mzimnene River where Swazi Milling is currently located. Hydropower was provided by the river’s flow, which was rapidly increased by funneling water through a channel.

The first customers were the rival shop owners Stewart and Howe. Their general dealerships were considered the best stores in town during the 1920s. Stewart’s location provided fortuitous when the South African Railway Administration introduced motorised coaches (buses) in 1928, and set up operations across the street. To bring people to and from South Africa on massive, noisy six-wheel buses, the Motor Transport Service (MTS) chose as its central depot not the capital Mbabane, but the better situated Bremersdorp. As a result, the town became the first and only Swazi town to gain a nickname: The Hub. Like Rome, all roads, and certainly all bus routes, led to Manzini.

Arthur Schwab ran a "Native Eating House" out of his butchery for its proprietor A.E. Nxumalo, which was frequented by the Swazi employees of the nearby Riverside Hotel. Swazi men seeking work in South African mines were recruited by the Witwatersrand Native Labour Association from an office in Bremersdorp. Two other butcheries existed in the town in the 1920s. Stewart and Bennett’s stores found competition in shops owned by proprietors named Mourdant, Lapidos, Udwin, Combrink, and Caleb Dlamini.

A "Native Location" Is Added

There were only two "industries" in Bremersdorp in 1930, the Swaziland Power Company, which provided electricity to an increasing number of homes and businesses (though there were yet no street lights), and the Swaziland Printing and Publishing Company. It was not town jobs, then, but bus transportation that brought Swazis to Bremersdorp for the first time in large numbers. Waiting to depart, or arriving too late to return to rural homes, Swazis were stranded in town, with no place to sleep, eat or use the toilet. Facilities at the MTS station between President and General Streets at the location of today’s Bhunu Mall were restricted to whites, and Africans were not allowed into the new Bremersdorp Hotel (the Velebantfu today) or the town’s other hotels.

Four years after Dr. David Hynd arrived from Scotland in 1925 to begin the most illustrious career of any Bremersdorp/Manzini resident, he noted "a marked influx of inhabitants (of all races) into the township since the establishment of the Motor Transport Service." White residents, said Hynd, who was the Medical Superintendent of Nazarene Hospital and the Medical Officer of Bremersdorp, were crowded into some dilapidated housing that was "a disgrace to our civilisation." Hynd was equally appalled by Swazis "living in quarters which are worse than the ordinary huts of the native areas." He noted three types of Swazis in Bremersdorp: domestic servants who either had no housing in town or crowded into unhygienic grass huts at a time when infectious diseases like cholera threatened the town’s well-being, permanent employees like wagon drivers, "store boys," messengers and unskilled labourers who had to live in similar overcrowded grass huts, and a large number of transients arriving by foot or by bus who had no accommodation at all, and slept under trees.

Original town plans called for a "native area" ("kaffir area," actually) located on the west side of the Mzimnene River. (Apparently anticipating an influx of Chinese workers, an 1890s plan called for a "Coolie Area.") While Dr. Hynd campaigned for better hygienic conditions in town to combat outbreaks of deadly typhoid fever, malaria and infectious diseases, plans were dusted off to create a Swazi township. Hynd was a member of the Bremersdorp Urban Areas Advisory Committee (Bremersdorp UAAC) along with Deputy Assistant Sidney B. Williams and three European members. The committee was formed in 1921 to supervise town growth. Advised by Swazi business people like Caleb Dlamini and A.E. Nxumalo, the committee approved the Zakhele African Location in 1929, the first urban area reserved for Swazis. (Mbabane’s Msunduza location followed in 1935.)

While the big MTS buses transported people and goods to South Africa, there was no public transport within Swaziland. Travel for Swazis was by foot, with day-long journeys from Bremersdorp to Mbabane quite normal. Swazi goods were transported on ox-sled. White people traveled by horseback. A few automobiles were owned by leading residents, but their usage was restricted by poor roads and the absence of bridges. After heavy rainfalls, when the small bridge spanning the Mzimnene at the foot of President Street was submerged, the town was cut off from the rest of Swaziland, a nation which became an archipelago of similarly isolated town islands during flooding.

Churches and Telephones

Bremersdorp had from the beginning shown its religious faith through the construction of churches. In the 1920s, a sense of permanency began to pervade the town, as if Bremersdorp realised it was here to stay. This attitude was reflected in its new churches, which were erected in stone. They survive as some of the oldest buildings in Swaziland. St. George’s Anglican Church was erected in 1919, with the patron saint etched in stained glass in the northeast corner. The Nazarene order built a handsome stone church as part of a school and hospital complex east of town. The Catholic Little Flower church was erected in 1926 next to the Little Flower convent, now St. Theresa’s school on Sandlane Street. On the hill above what is now Fairview township, the stone AME Church commanded a view of the emerging town below.

By 1930, King Sobhuza II had ruled for nine years, with Lobamba as his royal village. He reportedly did not care for Mbabane, the seat of colonial government, and preferred Bremersdorp. In 1952, he purchased a farm west of town, at Emasundwini. This became his favourite residence, and was the first royal home to have a telephone connection.

Phone service came fittingly as wires stretched across Swaziland. The District Commissioner had a phone at his residence, and there was one at the Nazarene Mission Hospital.

Bremersdorp’s activities were once again publicised in print with the revival of the Times of Swaziland in 1931, now published in Mbabane. Friday, the day the newspaper came out, was also market day. People from surrounding farms made it a point of coming to town to shop and visit. Because the weekend was commencing, it was common for folks to enjoy convivial evenings with town friends, and spend the night at their homes. Motion picture shows appeared at different locations, such as the Manzini Club, where by the end of the 1920s the elite met to whack golf and tennis balls east of downtown, at church halls, or wherever a portable protector and a bedsheet screen could be set up.

The Bremersdorp Hotel, with its welcoming arched entrance, was popular with visitors and residents. The upper walls of the dining room and bar were decorated by friezes of wildlife scenes painted by the legendary itinerant artist Conrad Frederick Jenal, whose work in South Africa has been declared a national artistic treasure. The King of England’s birthday was celebrated each year with a parade down the town’s unpaved streets, climaxing with a speech by the District Commissioner at Jubilee Park. The finest equestrian acts from Rhodesia and the Union appeared annually at the Bremersdorp Agricultural Show. Each spring, the town blossomed with a profusion of lavender blooms from jacaranda trees planted by District Commissioner Sydney Williams.

Though a press to process seed oil was opened in Bremersdorp in 1931, this was the exception to the decade’s lack of development, when up to the eve of the Second World War, British authorities were planning Swaziland’s incorporation into South Africa.

Services "Unforgettable and Thrilling"

But once war broke out, Swazi men enthusiastically heeded King Sobhuza’s call to "remind the British through your bravery of the promises they made to Mbandzeni," and enlisted to serve with the allied forces. The good will engendered by the Swazi Pioneer Brigade did much to focus British attention on the protectorate when the war as over.

Sobhuza sent his warriors off to service after they had been trained at the Bremersdorp Show Grounds. In November, 1941, the first group of 1 500 Swazi men left for the Middle East, where they initially did road construction and guard duty before entering combat. In all, nearly 4 000 Swazi men would go to northern Africa. Forming company units No. 1991 to No. 2000, the Swazi soldiers confronted the German army in 1942. Prince Dabede was appointed by Sobhuza to the traditional task of leading the Swazi emabutfo into battle. Not all returned. In all, 122 Swazi soldiers, and 12 European men from Swaziland, died in such epic encounters as the Battle of Anzio.

"No one will forget the thrilling services and sacrifices of the soldiers of this small territory," said Britain’s King George VI when he visited Swaziland in 1947, accompanied by his daughter, Princess Elizabeth, whose coronation in 1953 would bring King Sobhuza on his first trip out of Africa since 1922. Perhaps as a consequence of Swazi participation in World War II, the controversial 1944 Native Administration Proclamation that Swazis found objectionable was withdrawn in 1950. In 1947, the colonial government released a statement entitled "Race Segregation in Townships," which declared, "The High Commissioner desires to inform that in no circumstances can (he) accept the principle of racial discrimination as regards to trading sites in the Townships and that, as regards to residential sites, the question can be only considered if it becomes clear that Coloured and Native residents themselves desire that special areas be set aside for their use." Such self-segregation was never desired, and the stage was set for the multi-racial townships to come.

Investments for the Future

First, a population was required to fill the houses of any future townships, and residents began arriving when new town development commenced. The colonial government laid the groundwork by erecting in Bremersdorp a town and regional administrative complex not only extensive in scope, but heavy in symbolism.

On the south side of Jubilee park, a one-story office bloc, painted pink, and an attached courtroom were built in 1954. The park’s southwest corner saw a new Health Building. On the east side, a new post office went up, four years after postal service was localised from South Africa. The new building was the centre of postal and telegraph service in Swaziland.

The Times of Swaziland reported, "The opening of the new post office in Bremersdorp reflects the progress and development that has been achieved both within the township and the surrounding area." Local businessmen were encouraged by the government investment. Said one, Mr. G. Lewis, "Prior to three years ago, commerce and industry were cautious, but from then government attitude became more reassuring---and the several new buildings in the town are evidence of confidence in our administration."

The Colonial and Welfare Development Corporation (CDC) was financing large-scale agricultural schemes elsewhere in the country. Asbestos was emerging from Bulembu, timber from Pigg’s Peak, citrus from Tshaneni, and soon sugar cane from Mhlume. I Bremersdorp, Natie Kirsh arrived to begin a business that would evolve into the SWAKI group of companies.

The decade of the 1950s saw the maturation of Swazi political and business leaders who would mold the nation’s post-Independence future. It was an era akin to a dawning, a time when potential was being recognised, and plans to exploit this potential were percolating in people’s minds. Responding to the future needs of a nation, secondary schools were opened for the first time, following the lead of Swazi National High School in Matsapha 20 years before. The missionary schools led the way: Nazarene High, Salesian High for boys, and St. Theresa’s for girls. St. Michael’s High School and Manzini Central High School were built diagonally across town, on the hills to the northeast.

Bremersdorp, with one paved street now, President Street, continued to be a quiet place. The police department operated out of a three room building next to the custom’s house on the west side of the MTS bus rank, and officers left their firearms locked in the station cabinet as they went about their rounds, on foot. Herds of cattle were driven through the heart of town, stirring up the dusty streets. But the impression most visitors had was of a tidy, neat and very pretty little town. Attractive and orderly, Bremersdorp was a place where all government work from the veterinary office, some of the oldest remaining civic buildings dating from the 1940s, to the District Commissioner’s office closed down on Wednesday afternoon for "sports." The District Commissioner could be found at the country club, lobbing tennis balls. At the Bremersdorp Hotel, afternoon tea in the courtyard beneath the sheltering limbs of a giant banyan tree was a ritual.

In 1958, the town’s grandest structure, the Catholic Cathedral, was built, with a unadorned modern concrete bell tower whose cross, elevated even higher by a hill-top location, would remain the tallest object in Manzini. Now, by definition at least, Bremersdorp had all the requirements to become a city: "a town of some importance that has a Cathedral."

At a time when not a single structure existed between the Nazarene school and hospital complex and the Bremersdorp Hotel on the river, when parties were thrown not by invitation but by opening the front door of homes and allowing the music of record players to spill out into the night as advertisement, and when the largest bank in town, Standard Bank, was located in one room of the Hatzin Building (a striking white and blue trim streamline moderne building erected in 1955), few cared to make a case for Bremersdorp’s "importance."

A New Name, And Explosive Growth

That attitude was to change, swiftly and dramatically, during the 1960s, with events leading up to national independence.

Of Bremersdorp’s 4300 residents in 1959, 3000 were Swazis, a dramatic shift from two decades earlier when nearly all Swazis lived on rural emakhaya homesteads, and a reflection of a new era that found 80% of Swazi families dependent on cash income earned outside of the homestead.

In 1966, Swaziland’s population stood at 374 571, five times what it had been estimated in 1900. In the 1950s, Hlatikhulu was the most populous town in the kingdom, but in the Sixties it was Manzini. With 16 000 residents, Manzini was 25% more populous than Mbabane, which had 13 000 residents.

A chain of events led to the growth of Swaziland’s central hub: the Ngwenya mine in western Swaziland began producing iron ore on a ten-year contract with Japan, and to get the ore to Maputo’s seaport for shipping, the kingdom’s first rail line was built to the Mozambique border. Along this route, the Matsapha Industrial Site was created in 1965, on farmland beside the Lusushwana river and close to a town that could supply its needs. A symbiotic relationship developed between Manzini and Matsapha, and Manzini enjoyed a spurt of growth. A national highway connecting the hub with Mbabane was paved in 1964, and the following decade a national airport was opened east of Matsapha on the Manzini side.

A government gazette in 1963 established the Ngwane Park Township, southwest of town, where workers gravitating to Manzini and the Matsapha factories could live. Two years later, Fairview, northwest of downtown, began selling residential plots to middle-class home owners for R880 (about R44 000 today). St. Joseph’s primary and high school were opened there by Methodists, and all-white St. Williams became Mjingo High School. Upper middle-class homes were built in Coates Valley west of town to accommodate British workers manning a Cold War-era atomic blast monitoring site at Mpaka.

In 1964, the year the controversial first-draft independence constitution was published, the stolid three storey Mutual Building was open on a now-paved General Street, symbolising the renovation of downtown. Swaziland’s first shopping centre, President’s Centre on President Street, had opened in 1959, a block north of the Paramount Hotel, which also opened in the 1950s. When the hotel was new, King Sobhuza would drive himself from his home at Emasundwini, park in front, and beckon passersby, who would kneel on the pavement and pass on news to the monarch. The George Hotel was the town’s up-scale establishment, and was the site of social events as well as meetings of the Bremersdorp Indaba Society. The society brought together socially-aware individuals like David Hynd’s son, Dr. Samuel Hynd, Ambrose Zwane, Sishayi Nxumalo, George Murdoch, and several others who debated the issues of the day in an informal manner that entertained and illuminated audiences of listeners.

By 1964, the Indaba Society ended, because its more activist members were starting political parties in anticipation of national independence. Three years before, in 1961, Bremersdorp had its name officially changed to Manzini. Swazis had always known the place by that name, and for years the white business community had objected to their expanding, forward-looking community being saddled with the cow-town suffix "dorp."

There were still more vacant lots in town than buildings, and the paving of most downtown streets was not concluded until the 1970s. But development continued steadily. Brother Guilio, a resourceful handyman with the Catholic Salesian order, built a large cinema, named it Guilio’s, and it became the hub of the Hub’s entertainment scene. Swazis occupied seats on the ground floor, and white patrons were seated in the balcony during those final years of segregation. Two doors to the east, live entertainment in the form of theatrical dramas and children’s shows were performed by the Manzini Players. The acting ensemble included the architect George Shirley, whose firm designed many of Manzini’s schools, banks and commercial buildings from that era onward.

In the five years preceding Independence in 1968, Britain reacted to uprisings in its other African colonies with a show of force in their comparatively peaceful protectorate, Swaziland. The authorities overreacted to a 1963 general strike, when Swazi workers demanded a living wage of one pound per day, and a march in Mbabane nearly resulted in bloodshed. In response, a battalion of British soldiers, the Gordon Highlanders, which had suppressed unrest in Kenya, were flown in. They were replaced by another fighting force, the Glorious Glosters, in 1965. To accommodate the soldiers, construction began on the St. George’s Barracks at Matsapha, which along with the Matsapha Central Prison became two national facilities tied to Manzini. A new Manzini police station was modeled after one in Malawi, where stations were proliferating during pre-Independence unrest. Manzini residents were jarred at dawn each day when RAF planes buzzed the town at treetop level, ostensibly to "awaken" the pilots’ compatriots staying at the Paramount Hotel on General Street. But no conflict ensued, and the British soldiers were generally well received by the civilian population.

Independence

Swaziland’s own independence drive was peaceful, if not entirely tension free, under Sobhuza’s diplomatic leadership. Manzini was festooned with the new Swaziland flag when it was introduced in 1967, and a year later the town’s colonial offices were transformed into national offices. Gone forever were the days when ordinary Swazis were not permitted to purchase firearms at the Hatzin Building, or to enter the Manzini Club or the bars of the town’s hotels. (Swazis had to purchase bottles through holes cut into side walls). By 1971, old colonial street names were changed to new ones, and soon a new town council building greeted people entering town from the Mbabane side, with an iconic Swazi warrior and maiden statue standing out front.

But new problems emerged. By the end of the 1970s, urban migration was on the upswing, and many hopeful young men could not find jobs in Manzini or Matsapha, despite the continuous growth of the industrial site. Burglaries, robberies and muggings became common, though they never ceased to shock a community that throughout its existence had been peaceful and law abiding. The young criminals called themselves "Sidlani"---a question, really, rather than a name, because it means "what do we eat?" With the rise of criminal gangs, the town’s original Wild West reputation returned.

Manzini also became known as a home of political radicals. A serious riot erupted in the early 1970s when students showed support for teachers on strike for higher salaries. Clashes between protesters and police followed the displacement of Queen Regent Dzeliwe in 1984 by the Liqoqo, which ruled during the interregnum between the death of King Sobhuza in 1982 and the installation of King Mswati III in 1986. When in 1992 elders of the Tinkhundla government, established in 1978, traveled the kingdom to raise national matters on a "vusela" (greeting) exercise, they canceled their Manzini stop when confronted by a rowdy band of political activists. In the 1990s, a series of national stay-aways was called by the Manzini-based Swaziland Federation of Trade Unions, operating from an office in the latest post office building, opened by Prime Minister Mabandla in 1980. The stay-aways were mounted to agitate for a social, political and economic agenda named "The 27 Workers Demands." They climaxed with a week-long national shutdown in January, 1996, which resulted in a rolling riot down Nkhoseluhlaza Street from Jubilee Park to KaKhoza, a poor township west of town, where one bystander, a 17 year- old girl, was shot and killed.

City Status

But in 1990, when King Mswati III decreed that the town of Manzini henceforth would be known as a city, residents could look back on a history mostly characterised by calm. True, the abandoned hamlet of Bremersdorp was burned in 1901, but no major fires followed reconstruction, no natural disasters like flood or earthquake claimed lives or damaged property, and disease epidemics spared the populace. That good fortune changed when AIDS hit Manzini in the late 1990s.

The pandemic had worked its way into some residents’ blood years before, but its effect only became known when friends, neighbours and relatives began passing away in numbers that threatened to destabilise the new city, and the entire country. With the arrival of the year 2000, Hope House, a cluster of bungalows built beside St. Theresa’s clinic by Father Larry McDonnell, the former head of Salesian High School, became the city’s first AIDS hospice. By this time, non-governmental organisations with national agendas were headquartered in Manzini. A high population growth rate in Swaziland had prompted the Family Life Association to begin operations in 1980. King Mswati dedicated its headquarters building, built on Esser Street with American government funds, in 1998. Also from offices on Esser, Umtapo WaBomake sought to empower Swazi women through workshops and the financing of co-operative schemes. Operating out of a converted home next to Manzini’s Islamic mosque on Tenbergen Street, the Swaziland Action Group Against Abuse assisted victims of rape, gender and child abuse. The city had advanced to a point where crime and social ills were an inescapable reality, the byproduct of growth. Tall lighting fixtures were planted in Fairview and Ngwane Park as nighttime illumination against criminals, and efforts were made to find guardians for street children whose parents had succumbed to AIDS.

The physical face of Manzini was also transformed. A Millennium Park on the Mzimnene River was dedicated between the old bridge at the base of Ngwane Street and a new bridge that in 1995 extended Nkhoseluhlaza Street to a dual carriageway highway running to Matsapha and then, in 1998, to Mbabane. The park would be a venue for open-air concerts once held at the International Fair Grounds, a location targeted for development as a mall.

Manzini’s first mall, Bhunu Mall, rose over the site of the MTS bus rank, which had ceased operations when a host of Swazi-owned bus services began operating out of a public rank one block north, after parking for years at the site of the future City Council building. Opened in 1992 and dedicated by King Mswati in 1993 in the name of his grandfather, who was put on trial at a spot diagonally across Nkhoseluhlaza Street, Bhunu Mall vastly expanded residents’ shopping options. Prior to its opening, the Enterprise and Chris’ supermarket were the city’s main stores. Commercial activity was anchored on the southwest side of downtown when The Hub shopping complex opened on Mhlakuvane Street in 1993 above a scruffy area of car repair lots and light industry.

Entertainment tastes evolved. Nightclubs for the younger set (one of the first was the Egg Yoke discotheque behind the remodeled New George Hotel in the early 1970s) remained popular. One was Club Venus at Tiger City, a mirror-glass mall overlooking the city from Zakhele, where it was opened in May, 1998. But projected-video cinemas at Tiger City and The Hub struggled against video rental shops and a proliferation of home satellite dishes, which became smaller and more affordable in the mid-1990s. In 1998, cellular phone service began in the kingdom, and users could be seen pressing handsets to their ears as they made their way through the crowded Manzini market. They had to turn them off for security reasons when entering the five banks operating at century’s end: First National at Bhunu Mall, Standard Chartered (at Estel House, the Hub, and Nkhoseluhlaza Street), Nedbank, Swazi Development and Savings Bank and Swaziland Building Society on Nkhoseluhlaza Street, or the Building Society’s branch on Ngwane Street. Patrons at the post office began sending e-mails through the worldwide web from an Internet Cafe, opened in 1998.

The area of Helemisi was developed as affordable housing below Fairview at Bypass Road, which skirted downtown to the north and terminated at the golf course near an upscale development called Madonsa Township. The city’s eastern edge was now defined by Enjabulweni School, a private grade school built in 1994 on land donated by King Mswati.

The blue-glass Estel House, the bronze-hued Liqhaga House, the brick complex of flats and shops on Mancishane Street that is the city’s largest building, all opened between 1986 and 1990, and an office block built by the Swaziland National Association of Teachers (SNAT) on Mancishane in 2000, lent a big town feel to the cityscape. SNAT’s national headquarters, opened in 1998, was located across William Pitcher Street from William Pitcher college, where generations of Swazi school teachers were trained.

Compared to these substantial buildings, much growth on newly developed areas such as the bus rank and along the river has been haphazard and unsightly. But the same was said a century before, and those first shanty dwellings came to be replaced in time by grander structures.

Song of the Hub

Manzini---the name Bremersdorp is remembered only by older residents---begins the 21st century with the official name of city, but with a languorous, small town feel. A brisk walk from one end of downtown to the other, from the traffic circle opposite the golf course to the bridges spanning the river, takes all of fifteen minutes. The walk is interrupted by only four traffic lights. The city’s first traffic light, at Ngwane and Sandlane Streets, was not even there until 1983. Sidewalk venders, whose proliferation was a phenomenon of the 1990s, sell fruits and vegetables. Boys blare announcements of sales through loudspeakers before chain stores. People congregate in pairs or small groups, passing the time of day in a city that appears to be on no hurry to get to where it is going. At the library, silence is observed among serious studying students in school uniforms filling tables before long brown-tinted windows whose 360-degree second-storey view shows that the principal feature of Manzini is still its trees. Each season brings a new blossoming of colour-coordinated flowers along the paths of Jubilee Park and the knoll of grass beside city council chambers. Prominent marriages and funerals are held in the cathedral, where the red flowers of coral trees in December contrast with the lavender profusion of the streets’ jacarandas of October.

70 000 residents now call Manzini home, a number greater than the entire population of Swaziland a hundred years before. Despite some ungainly development and a host of new social challenges, the city captures the essence of Swazi life in its casual pace and informal, friendly attitude.

And in this way, the years of change have not altered Bremersdorp/Manzini at all: it is still a place, as it was in the beginning, where everybody knows your name.