The KaNgwane and Ingwavuma Plot Systematically Halted

The KaNgwane and Ingwavuma Plot Systematically Halted

On 18 June 1982, the Government Gazette published a Proclamation by which the forty-two member KaNgwane Legislative Assembly was dissolved. Together with the Ingwavuma district, KaNgwane was placed under the direct control of the Department of Cooperation and Development. This was in line with the apartheid government’s attempts to transfer both territories to Swaziland.

KaNgwane was created in 1977 as AmaSwazi, and the attempt to transfer it, together with Ingwavuma, to Swaziland failed after popular protest of 1982, leading to its dissolution. During the 1970s and through Swazi ethnic mobilisation in South Africa, Chief Mkolishi Dlamini led the struggle for the incorporation of the KwaNgwane Bantustan into Swaziland. Chief Dlamini, together with a minority of the officially recognised Swazi chiefs, campaigned for an ethnically “pure” KaNgwane Bantustan and protested at the continued presence in the territory of the “Shangaan” and other minority groups. In 1978, Chief Dlamini and ten other chiefs formally petitioned King Sobhuza to begin negotiations on their behalf for their incorporation into Swaziland.

Chief Mkolishi Dlamini had always envisioned a homeland based on chiefly politics, founding an opposition party, “Inyatsi ya Mswati”, that resuscitated ethnic nationalism as part of homeland politics. “Inyatsi ya Mswati”, as claimed by Chief Dlamini, “sought to unite all Swazi’s … to be able to press the South African government for a fair deal in so far as the allocation of land for Swazi’s was concerned”. His basis was that boundaries were ratified by Britain in terms of the Pretoria Convention of 1881 and the London Convention of 1884, which led to the untenable situation that more Swazis lived outside of Swaziland, than within it. Furthermore, the land partition of 1907 and its subsequent implementation meant that vast numbers of Swazis found themselves alienated from the land and were hence forced to seek wage-labour on the Witwatersrand mines and on white-owned farms.

In keeping with the Bantu Authorities Act 68 of 1951, the Promotion of Bantu Self-Government Act 46 of 1959 and the National States Constitution Act 21 of 1971, the South African based Swazis were covertly and overtly removed from the Transvaal and artificially assembled in, what was absurdly designated, as their “own” territory. With the establishment of the Swazi Territorial Authority on 23 April 1976 and the KaNgwane Legislative Assembly in October 1977, the South African Swazis were officially recognised as an autonomous political unit with their own land and central authority, and completely independent from Swazis who were citizens of the Kingdom of Swaziland. Thus, the Bantustan of KaNgwane, was formally established by the racist regime, in official apartheid jargon.

The apartheid government was facing mounting political pressure in the early 1980s with the strengthening of the African National Congress’ military wing, Umkhonto we Sizwe’s (MK) Eastern Transvaal and Northern Zululand underground machinery and networks. This was made possible by the political changes in Mozambique and Angola after gaining independence from Portugal in the mid-1970s. By the early 1980s the situation on South Africa’s eastern border with Swaziland and Mozambique was causing serious concern to the apartheid South African Defence Force (SADF) generals, thus leading the apartheid government to enter into a land deal with the sovereign government of Swaziland. This was in line with what apartheid Prime Minister PW Botha called a “constellation of southern African states (CONSAS)”.

The Swazi land deal was therefore negotiated under the vague idea of a CONSAS, which became the ultimate objective of South Africa’s regional strategy. Neighbouring states were expected to be “part of a regional alliance” in which South Africa would play a pivotal role. It would be essentially an alliance of supposedly anti-Marxist states designed to re-create the protective shield that the apartheid regime had enjoyed before the fall of the Portuguese colonies in 1975. The incentive was to bind the participating states together into an economic bloc, as a “reward”, to deepen their respective economic links with the South African economy. Hence, CONSAS was designed to be the persuasive aspect of regional policy.

The issue of the incorporation of KaNgwane Bantustan into Swaziland was therefore plotted by the apartheid government to solidify the secret South African-Swaziland security agreement, concluded on 12 February 1982, as part of the CONSAS regional arrangement. The apartheid government’s persuasive strategy was to seduce the Swazi monarch, King Sobhuza II, through the land deal, enticing him to consider the possibility of regaining territory lost to the Transvaal Republic during the nineteenth century. This was based on the understanding that the reunification of the Swazi people was King Sobhuza’s major goal during his reign.

Specifically, the apartheid regime indicated an interest in discussing the transfer of two parcels of territory to the Kingdom of Swaziland – the entire KaNgwane Bantustan and the Ingwavuma area which formed part of the KwaZulu Bantustan. The Ingwavuma area, in particular, was a strip of land that would make it possible for Swaziland to realise another longstanding objective of gaining direct access to the seas and the wider world via the Indian Ocean. However, the offer was contingent upon Swaziland reversing its position of allowing the ANC to operate within its territory, by signing a security pact with apartheid regime and introducing an intensified crackdown on the ANC. Hence, on 12 February 1982, the two governments concluded, what was then a secret security arrangement.

These solid, covert relations received a public manifestation on 14 June 1982, when the apartheid Minister of Cooperation and Development, Dr Piet Koornhof, informed the KwaZulu Bantustan’s Legislative Assembly of the intentions to cede the Ingwavuma region of KwaZulu and the KaNgwane Bantustan to Swaziland. Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi, the KwaZulu Bantustan’s Chief Minister, was livid, warning Koornhof in his response that the cession of Ingwavuma would severely damage Zulu-Afrikaner relations as well as cause bad blood between Zulus and Swazis.

In its attempt to legalise these land deals and alter existing colonial boundaries, the apartheid government set up the Rumpff Commission of Enquiry. Furthermore, with an arbitrary and unilateral dissolution of the Legislative Assembly on 18 June 1982, it issued a statement in a Government Gazette which proclaimed the cession of the KaNgwane Bantustan to the sovereign Kingdom of Swaziland. Speaking on the night of the announcement, KaNgwane Bantustan’s Chief Minister, Enos Mabuza, expressed opposition to the move, saying that the Rumpff Commission should first consider the legality of the resolutions and decisions of the KaNgwane Legislative Assembly which, although constituted on the basis of apartheid government and customary law, was representative of a democratic body which, particularly on this matter, represented the free will of the people of KaNgwane.

Mabuza did not rely solely on the South African legal system or the Swaziland Government for support. He spearheaded the anti-incorporation attempt through his political party, the Inyandza National Movement. At a prayer meeting held on 23 May 1982, Mabuza informed thousands of supporters that “We are not only intent on fighting for our own political survival. Ours is a national struggle for the right of an oppressed people to decide and determine their political future. … Indeed, we are here today because the battle lines of the fight that we are engaged in have not been drawn along tribal, regional and ethnic affiliation. It is a national struggle for the right of a people and their children, to self-determination.”

The African National Congress (ANC) conveyed its response just over a month later, on 15 July 1982, when it released a statement from Lusaka wherein it asserted that the agreement had already “generated intense animosities between Swazi and Swazi and between Swazi and Zulu, involving millions of African people”. The statement said it would be “highly regrettable” if Swaziland undermined this “by joining hands with the apartheid regime in carrying out a policy which aims at transforming South Africa into a white man’s country by declaring the African people aliens in the country of their birth.”

In the face of the mounting political mobilisation of the masses and a united front represented by iNyandza, in alliance with the ANC, the apartheid government on 19 June 1984 decided not to pursue the proposed cession of KaNgwane to Swaziland. It also disbanded the Rumpff Commission, with Justice Rumpff concluding that the overwhelming majority of South African Swazi’s were opposed to incorporation and it would be absurd to impose 800 000 KaNgwane citizens on the 500 000 citizens of the Kingdom of Swaziland; surely the majority will not rule. The United Nations also rejected the proposed incorporation of Ingwavuma, highlighting that the African inhabitants hadn’t achieved the political liberty needed to express a considered opinion on such a significant issue.

At a Press Conference in Maputo on 5 March 1982, ANC President Oliver Tambo described the land deal “as a move against our struggle and against the interests of Africa”. Tambo condemned the attempts by Pretoria to deprive a further million Africans of their citizenship and make them citizens of another country. “The apartheid regime wished to destroy the Southern African Development Coordination Conference (SADCC), and build up instead the Constellation of Southern African States (CONSAS), in which it would like to see as members Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland as well as the independent bantustans. We have pleaded, and we are pleading with our brothers in Swaziland, a country which supports our struggle, to stay its hand in this matter, and to avoid being pushed into a position in which it is allied with the Pretoria regime against everybody else.”

Sources:
Wikipedia.
South African History Online (SAHO).
Press Conference in Maputo: Comments by Oliver Tambo on South African offer of territory to Swaziland, 5 March 1982, South African History Archives (SAHA).
Pieter Esterhuysen, “Current Affairs: Greater Swaziland”, Africa Insight, Vol. 12, No. 3, 1982.
Sifiso Mxolisi Ndlovu, “Sowing the Seeds of Political Mobilisation in Bantustans: Resistance to the Cession of the Kangwane Bantustan to the Kingdom of Swaziland”, Journal for Contemporary History, Vol. 43 No. 1, 2018.
Murdhi Awad Nassar Al-Khaledi, “Coercive Diplomacy: The Nkomati Accord Between Mozambique and South Africa”, PhD Thesis, University of Kent at Canterbury, February 1990.
Medard Xwelamira, “Refugees in a Chess Game: Reflections on Botswana, Lesotho and Swaziland Refugee Policies”, The Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, Uppsala 1990.
Thula Simpson, “Umkhonto we Sizwe: The ANC’s Armed Struggle”, Penguin, 2016.
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, “The Commission of Inquiry into Kangwane (The Rumpff Commission): In Re the Matter of the Cession of Kangwane to Swaziland”, Brief of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law United States of America as Amicus Curiae, 13 March 1984.
Kenneth W. Grundy, “The Rise of the South African Security Establishment: An Essay on the Changing Locus of State Power”, The South African Institute of International Affairs, August 1983.
Editorial, “What’s Behind the Great South African Homeland Giveaway”, SASPU National, August 1982.
T.W. Bennett and N.S. Peart, “The Ingwavuma Land Deal: A Case Study of Self-Determination”, Boston College Third World Law Journal, Vol. 6 No. 23, 1986.

Castro Khwela
Good morning fellow Compatriots!