Arriving in Swaziland

I drove the two hundred and fifty miles from Pretoria to Swaziland in the new Bedford half-ton pick-up to begin my work as Director of the Usuthu Mission in September 1951.  Apart from Wilmot Jali, the parish priest, his wife Rosina and the few labourers employed on the mission, I found the congregation at the Mission on strike.  They had vowed never to enter the church again.

The Diocese of Zuluand, based at Eshowe, three hundred miles away in Natal, was congratulating itself on its decision to keep only 120 acres for the mission and to sell the other 5,000 acres to the Swazi Nation at half the normal price.  The nation was far from being grateful.  The diocese was unaware that the land had been given free of charge to Jekeseni (Jackson, missionary at Usuthu in the 1890s) by Mbandzeni, the Paramount Chief and the father of Sobhuza II, who succeeded him in 1900 and remained Paramount Chief until the 1980s.  They were saying, “Your neighbour’s wife has a new baby but she has no milk.  You lend him a cow.  Two years later, the baby is weaned.  Does he then sell it back to you?”  Everything depended on good relations between the Church and the Swazi nation. I sent a telegram to the bishop saying “Please cancel sale or I will return to Pretoria.”  He did so and I stayed.  The strike was over. 

The Usuthu Mission was responsible for the work of the Anglican Church in half the country.  Its centre was a small church in the Malkerns Valley built before World War I, a primary school and two new rondavels (round huts).  One was to be our living quarters.  The other our bedroom.  Later we built a small house.  The Usuthu had been closed as a mission station in 1913 because of malaria and was now an outstation of Manzini, the Place of Waters.

This was to become the home of the Mirfield Old Students’ Mission to Swaziland for the next ten years.  The first Old Student to serve was Anthony Molesworth who had been a curate at St Mary’s, Blyth, in Newcastle diocese.  He was a great linguist and storyteller but not all his stories were printable.  Others who joined later were Peter Burtwell and Anthony Salmon. 

Paramount Chief Sobhuza and Donald

Sobhuza was a wise ruler in an age when autocracy was already out of date.  He moved with ease in an out of traditional Swazi culture and language into the modern world.  Fortunately he agreed to attend my unveiling and came with his indunas (advisers) in colourful Swazi dress and an appropriate wife out of the hundred he had acquired.  He spoke perfect Swazi and English.  Sobhuza graciously welcomed me but said pointedly that the Anglican Church had so far done very little with the land his father had given us.  His followers seemed to agree.  I chose a Swazi proverb with which to open my reply.  ‘The mouth can cross even a river in flood.’  If your people and we can work together, there may be something to see in a few years’ time.  Six years later I referred to this meeting when speaking at the official opening of St Christopher’s school.                                     

The Malkerns Valley was dramatic.  To the west, the slopes of the Drakensberg mountains, which Usuthu Forests was just beginning to cover with pine trees.  Eastwards you looked across the lowveld to the Lebombo mountains, 50 miles away marking the border of Mozambique.  Alongside us flowed the Great Usuthu River, which provided us with constantly replenished building sand.  Work was just beginning on the Malkerns irrigation scheme, which was to turn the whole valley into rice paddies and citrus orchards.  Over the next 20 years the trees would provide all the electricity the country needed and also irrigate vast acres of rice.

A Zulu priest, Wilmot Jali was in charge of the parish.  His wife Rosamund was the very competent head of the primary school.  Bit by bit we managed to get the church going again.  The parish covered the southern half of Swaziland but little was happening except at the Usuthu, Mankaiana and Hlakikulu.  There was an old and decrepit mission station at Endlozana, just across the Transvaal border in South Africa.  I had a motor scooter and went off on a 120 mile trip once a month.

Many Swazi were polygamous.  Most men went as migrant labourers to the Johannesburg gold mines, which then employed 350,000 men, creaming off the most go-ahead from Swaziland, Lesotho, Zululand, Mozambique and Malawi.

Men and boys did the ploughing with oxen, other agricultural work was done by women.  As the boys were herding cattle for the five months when the maize was growing, few of them got very far at school.  The top classes were mainly girls:  western culture came into Swaziland through women.  It was the other way round in Malawi.  Gardens there are tilled by hoe and that is women’s work, so the boys went to school.