686
September 2015
PHOTOGRAMMETRIC ENGINEERING & REMOTE SENSING
“I
n eastern Swaziland archaeologists
have discovered human remains dating
back 110,000 years, but the ancestors
of the modern Swazi people arrived relatively
recently. During the great Bantu migrations into
southern
, one group, the Nguni, moved
down the east coast. A clan settled near what is
now
in
and a dynasty was
founded by the Dlamini family. In the mid-18th
century increasing pressure from other Nguni
clans forced King Ngwane III to lead his people
south to lands by the Pongola River, in what is
now southern Swaziland. Today, Swazis consider
Ngwane III to have been the first king of Swaziland.
The next king, Sobhuza I, withdrew under pressure
from the Zulus to the Ezulwini Valley, which today
remains the center of Swazi royalty and ritual.
When King Sobhuza I died in 1839, Swaziland
was twice its present size. Trouble with the Zulu
continued, although the next king, Mswazi (or
Mswati), managed to unify the whole kingdom.
By the time he died in 1868, the Swazi nation was
secure. Mswazi’s subjects called themselves people
of Mswazi, or Swazis, and the name stuck.
“The arrival of increasing numbers of Europeans from
the mid-19
th
century brought new problems. Mswazi’s
successor, Mbandzeni, inherited a kingdom rife with
European carpetbaggers – hunters, traders, missionaries
and farmers, many of whom leased large expanses of land.
The
Convention of 1881 guaranteed Swaziland’s
‘independence’ but also defined its borders, and Swaziland lost
large chunks of territory. ‘Independence’ in fact meant that both
the British and the Boers had responsibility for administering
their various interests in Swaziland, and the result was chaos.
The Boer administration collapsed with the 1899–1902 Anglo-
BoerWar, andafterwards theBritish tookcontrol of Swazilandas
KINGDOM OF
a protectorate. Swaziland became independent on 6 September
1968. The country’s constitution was largely the work of the
British. Currently, Swaziland’s greatest challenge comes from
the HIV/AIDS pandemic; the country has the world’s highest
HIV infection rate (almost 39% for adults between 15 and 49
years of age), and life expectancy has fallen as a result from 58
to 33 years”
(Lonely Planet, 2015), (The Kingdom of Swaziland,
D. Hugh Gillis, 1999, ISBN:0-313-30670-2).
Bordered by
(108 km) (
PE&RS
, September
1999) and South Africa (438 km) (
PE&RS
, September 2012),
the lowest point is the Great Usutu River (21 m) and the
highest point is Emiembe (1,862 m). Slightly smaller than
New Jersey, the terrain is
mostly mountains and hills; some
moderately sloping plains.
(World FactBook, 2015)
.
“In 1897 a Portuguese-South African commission demarked
with beacons or pillars the four principal points of the
Moçambique-Swaziland boundary, which were designated by
the 1888 commission as Ipoye, Buchanan, Nunes da Silva,
and Krogh. The State Secretary of the South African republic
agreed to the beaconing of the 1897 commission, except for the
Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing
Vol. 81, No. 9, September 2015, pp. 686–687.
0099-1112/15/686–687
© 2015 American Society for Photogrammetry
and Remote Sensing
doi: 10.14358/PERS.81.9.686
