Ndzimandze in the Swazi record
Bonner places the Ndzimandze, with the Thabede, in command of the Lubombo flats below the mountain chiefdoms of the Mahlalela, Maziya, Sifundza and Masilela (p. 42).
What the books say
He says the Maziya and Mahlalela submitted to Sobhuza only after the neighbouring Ndzimandze had been destroyed (p. 42), so the Ndzimandze chiefdom appears to have been broken in the early Swazi expansion. He also reports a story that the Maseko installed an Ndzimandze woman as chief wife in a village built for the Dlamini princess laMbombotsi, which deeply offended her (p. 43).
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). Little else is recorded in these two books about the Ndzimandze, and we found no account of the chiefdom by its own people.
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 Ndzimandze praises or totem because none has been confirmed. If you belong to the Ndzimandze 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)
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