Mdluli in the Swazi record
The Mdluli appear in Bonner and Gillis through royal officials and queens. Wikipedia’s article on the Swazi people names the Mdluli among the 17 founding clans.
What the books say
Bonner names Mtshengu Mdluli among the royal functionaries placed in charge of previously autonomous chiefdoms under Mswati (p. 100) and Matsafeni Mdluli as Mswati’s and then Mbandzeni’s Hhohho indvuna, who spurred the princes to a raid against Thandile’s advice (p. 125), advised people to resist paying taxes in 1884 (p. 188), and fled Hhohho with the king’s cattle in 1887, a grievance Shepstone was commissioned to put to Kruger (p. 197).
Gillis says that when Mbandzeni died, the choice of a successor fell on the young son of Labotsibeni Mdluli, Bhunu (Ngwane V), and that two women were at the centre of the episode of rejection of the proposed transfer, the queen-regent Tibati Nkambule and the young king’s mother Labotsibeni Mdluli (pp. 89, 99). Elsewhere Gillis dates her long tenure as queen-mother and queen-regent from 1875 to 1921 (p. 21).
Sources and cautions
This page summarises two scholarly histories of the Swazi kingdom: Philip Bonner’s Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires (read from SAHO’s scanned PDF by OCR; page numbers below are PDF pages), and D. Hugh Gillis’s The Kingdom of Swaziland: Studies in Political History (read from SAHO’s scanned PDF by OCR; page numbers below are PDF pages). Matsafeni Mdluli and Matsafeni Shongwe are different men: our listing noted a local history naming a Matsafeni Mdluli as a general who joined Matsafeni Shongwe in a war with the Sotho. We found no Mdluli-authored history.
We read these two books only through machine OCR of a scanned copy, so names and dates may contain OCR errors, and we have not checked them against the printed pages or against the other histories they cite (Matsebula, Bryant, Kuper, Stuart’s archive). Both books rely heavily on oral evidence collected in the 1970s from clan informants, and they present contested episodes from a particular scholarly point of view.
Izithakazelo and totem
We are printing no Mdluli praises or totem because none has been confirmed. If you belong to the Mdluli and recite your izithakazelo, we would like to record them, with your permission and credited to you.
Sources and further reading
- Philip Bonner: Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires (SAHO scan)
- D. Hugh Gillis: The Kingdom of Swaziland: Studies in Political History (SAHO scan)
- Wikipedia: Swazi people (clan lists)
Do you belong to the Mdluli? Tell us your praises and what elders say about the history, and we will add it, credited to you. Share what you know or WhatsApp 065 138 8213.