Fakudze in the Swazi record
The Fakudze appear in Bonner as officers and councillors of the Swazi kings. He says Macetshane Fakudze was given a strategic post around the Bulungu range when Sobhuza moved north (p. 44), that Mngayi Fakudze led the Swazi in the battle at Lubuya in which two of Dingane’s regiments were killed, which Bonner treats as blocking Dingane’s occupation (p. 55), and that Mbovane Fakudze, with Sandlane Zwane, was one of the nation’s two leading councillors in the 1880s (p. 159).
What the books say
Bonner’s notes cite interviews with Fakudze informants in 1970 (for example Mandlabovu Fakudze and Maboya Fakudze), and Gillis does not name the Fakudze in the passages we searched. Our earlier listing, from Wikipedia, gave no information on the Fakudze.
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). We found no Fakudze-authored history or praise text in the books.
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 Fakudze praises or totem because none has been confirmed. If you belong to the Fakudze 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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