Mbabane

Mbabane was founded in 1887 by Mickey Wells, where the route from the Transvaal to Mozambique crossed the Mbabane River, and took its name from Mbabane Kunene, a chief who lived in the area when British settlers arrived. For its first years it was a small place of a few shops, churches and schools.

Its importance came with colonial administration. In January 1902, during the South African War, the administrative centre was moved to Mbabane from Bremersdorp, now Manzini, and after the war Swaziland became a British High Commission Territory. Black Swazis were not allowed to live in the town itself, which by the 1930s had electricity, running water, telephones and a hospital, while the kingship remained at Lobamba in the valley below — a division between administrative and traditional capitals that has lasted ever since.

Growth was slow until after the Second World War, when trade schools, the railway to Maputo and foreign investment, particularly in sugar, drew workers and money into the town. Independence in 1968 made Mbabane the capital of a sovereign kingdom, and government, finance and tourism became its main business. Since then it has spread up the hillsides, with townships such as Msunduza filling the slopes and new suburbs and shopping plazas replacing much of the colonial fabric. It remains the largest town in the country, though a modest one, and the political events of recent years — including the protests of 2021 — have been felt here as strongly as anywhere.

Mbabane is where Swazi tradition meets the machinery of a modern state. Civil servants, diplomats and business people work in the plazas by day, yet the royal calendar shapes the year as firmly here as in the countryside: offices close for national ceremonies, and families travel down the valley to Ludzidzini for the Umhlanga in late winter and the Incwala in the weeks around midsummer, events that belong to the nation rather than to tourism.

Craft is the town's most visible cultural product. Markets and workshops in Mbabane and the valleys below sell basketry, carving, batik, woven mohair, glass and candles, and the country's formal handcraft businesses employ more than 2,500 people, many of them women. Music runs from church and school choirs, which are taken seriously and competed in, to gospel, kwaito and house played from minibus taxis and bars, with the Bushfire festival each May at Malkerns bringing southern African and international acts within reach of the capital.

Manners matter. Greetings are exchanged before anything else, elders and chiefs are given precedence, and dress in town is neat and fairly formal. Church attendance is high, often blended with ancestral observance, and both siSwati and English are heard in the same conversation. Football is the mass spectator sport, with the national stadium at Lobamba the venue for big matches.

Mbabane's population was estimated at about 95,000 in 2010, which makes the capital a large town rather than a city, and its working population grows each morning as minibus taxis bring commuters in from the valleys. Government and financial services are central to its economy, alongside retail, education and health; many households also depend on wages earned in Manzini, on the sugar estates or across the border in South Africa.

The town's shape follows its hills. The centre holds the plazas, ministries and banks; townships such as Msunduza climb the slopes near it; leafier suburbs spread over the surrounding hills; and newer housing reaches out to suburbs such as Sidwashini. Housing pressure has pushed settlement up steep ground and out along the roads, and water supply, drainage and traffic on the narrow approach roads are recurring concerns.

Days start early — taxis and school runs before seven, offices from eight — and the centre empties in the late afternoon, when much of its social life moves to the Ezulwini valley. Unemployment, especially among the young, is high, and Eswatini's severe HIV epidemic has shaped a generation of households, though treatment programmes have changed the outlook markedly. Weekends mean church, football, funerals and family visits to rural homesteads.

Everyday eating in Mbabane is Southern African and maize-based. Sishwala, a stiff maize porridge close to South African pap, is the staple, served with a relish of beans, stewed beef or chicken, or umbidvo wetintsanga — pumpkin leaves cooked with groundnuts. Sidvudvu, pumpkin cooked down with maize meal, and incwancwa, a sour porridge of fermented maize, are the older comfort foods, and emahewu, a drink made from thin fermented porridge, is widely drunk.

Town food adds braai meat from roadside grills and butchery-to-fire shops, boerewors sausage, chakalaka relish, grilled chicken and chips, and the Portuguese-influenced peri-peri dishes and prawns that arrive from Mozambique. South African bakery and takeaway chains fill the plazas, and markets sell avocados, sugar cane, groundnuts and dried beans, with food stalls offering meat stew, maize meal and roasted corn on the cob.

Drinks run from strong sweet tea to local lager and, in ceremonial settings, home-brewed umcombotsi. Fresh fruit juice, especially pineapple from the Malkerns valley, is common, and the valley's farm kitchens and lodge restaurants are where Swazi dishes are most often put in front of visitors.