The Matsebula clan holds an unusually close relationship to the Eswatini (Swazi) royal house: by long-standing custom, the king’s first wife is chosen from the Matsebula clan, and is known by the title laMatsebula.
Origins and royal role
We have not been able to source a detailed written account of the Matsebula clan’s own founding or early migration history – a common gap for Swazi clans whose fullest documentation exists in Siswati-language sources rather than material readily available online. What is well documented is the clan’s enduring role in Swazi royal ritual life. Historian and linguist J.S.M. Matsebula (1918-1993), author of the standard reference work A History of Swaziland and private secretary to King Sobhuza II, was born outside Mbabane into a family noted for its traditional role in royal ceremony – he was a great-grandson of Gcina Matsebula, first headman of the Embhuleni royal village.
More broadly, Swazi clan history divides between the Bemdzabuko – the “original” Swazi grouping that arrived with the royal Dlamini lineage – and the Emakhandzambili, the Nguni and Sotho-Tswana-affiliated groups already settled in the area before them, who were later incorporated through intermarriage and political alliance. We have not been able to confirm from the sources available to us which of these two broad groupings the Matsebula clan itself belongs to.
Totem and related clans
About three-quarters of Swazi clan groups trace Nguni origins, with the remainder Sotho, Tsonga and other Southern African ancestries, reflecting centuries of intermarriage among the groups that came to make up the Swazi nation. We have not found a confirmed totem specific to the Matsebula clan.
Geography
The Matsebula clan is closely associated with the Mbabane area and the Embhuleni royal village in Eswatini, reflecting its historic role in the royal household.
Izithakazelo / tibongo
We have not yet sourced a confirmed written record of the Matsebula clan praises. If you can help us document them accurately, please get in touch using the details below.
In the Swazi histories by Bonner and Gillis
Bonner says the Matsebula were soon providing the king’s chief ritual wife once the Ngwane (Dlamini-led) nucleus had assimilated the groups it conquered, while the Sotho Motsa provided his second insila, a blood brother who became the king’s closest companion (PDF p. 45); he adds that the Mndzebele supplied the chief wife of Ndvungunye and the Nsibande the chief indvuna to his son. Wikipedia’s Swazi people and succession articles, which our earlier notes used, likewise name the Matsebula among the founding clans and as the clan of the king’s first wife.
The name also belongs to the historian J. S. M. Matsebula, whose A History of Swaziland (1972) is one of the standard accounts. Both Bonner and Gillis rely on it and sometimes correct it: Gillis calls it a general history on which he drew (PDF p. 12), notes that it gives 1816 in its chronology although an earlier date is more likely, and that Matsebula and others put Mswati’s death in 1868 while Bonner suggests 1865 (pp. 193 to 194); Bonner says Matsebula misreads the 1866 treaty negotiations and gives little idea of the scale of violence after Ludvonga’s death (pp. 121, 138). These are comments on the book, not on the clan. We claim no link between the author and the ritual-wife clan beyond a shared name.
Bonner also cites a Mankayana Matsebula for the establishment of a royal homestead with a gift of cattle from Shaka (p. 44), and his notes show interviews with Matsebula informants. We found no account of the Matsebula by themselves in the books.
This section summarises two scholarly histories of the Swazi kingdom: Philip Bonner’s Kings, Commoners and Concessionaires and D. Hugh Gillis’s The Kingdom of Swaziland: Studies in Political History (both read from SAHO’s scanned PDFs by OCR; page numbers are PDF pages). The ritual-wife role is reported in a single sentence of Bonner, and we do not know how the Matsebula themselves see it.
We read these two books only through machine OCR of scanned copies, so names and dates may contain OCR errors, and we have not checked them against the printed pages or the other histories they cite (Matsebula, Bryant, Kuper, Stuart’s archive). Both books rely heavily on oral evidence collected in the 1970s and present contested episodes from a scholarly point of view.
Sources and further reading
- Wikipedia, “J.S.M. Matsebula”
- Wikipedia, “Bemdzabuko” and “Swazi people”
- J.S.M. Matsebula, A History of Swaziland and Izakhiwo zamaSwazi (1952)
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