Swaziland

The kingdom's original name was Ngwane, taken from the Dlamini clan ancestor Ngwane III, who led his people across the Lubombo Mountains around 1750 and settled between the Pongola and Lomati Rivers. The Swazi people called themselves amaSwati, meaning people of Mswati, after Mswati I ruled in the 1820s. Mswati II, his son, expanded the kingdom dramatically between 1840 and 1865, and neighboring peoples used his name to identify the whole territory. By the 1840s, British traders and Boer trekkers in the Transvaal were writing Swazieland in their correspondence.

Mswati II died in 1865, before any formal document used Swaziland as an administrative unit. His kingdom then entered a period of contested sovereignty. The Transvaal Republic and the British Crown both sought control over it, drawn by reports of gold and fertile land in the mountains. A series of conventions in 1881, 1884, and 1894 progressively stripped Swazi sovereignty until the South African Republic took formal administration.

Britain assumed direct control in 1906, and the territory became the Swaziland Protectorate under the High Commission for South Africa, administered from Pretoria. The name Swaziland was by then standard in all official correspondence, though the Swazi word for themselves was Swati, not Swazi. The z was an English phonetic approximation of a consonant cluster in siSwati that has no equivalent in English. Maps printed in London labeled it neatly, as if the name had always existed.

Swaziland became independent on September 6, 1968, the last British protectorate in southern Africa to do so. The name persisted for fifty years of independence, a habit of colonial cartography that no one rushed to change. In April 2018, King Mswati III announced the country would be called Eswatini, meaning land of the Swazi in siSwati. The word Swaziland is now a historical artifact, found in pre-2018 books, older maps, and the names of institutions founded before that year.