Maziya in the Swazi record
Bonner places the Maziya, with the Mahlalela, Sifundza and Masilela, on a section of the Lubombo among the Tsonga or partly Tsonga-ised Sotho chiefdoms of the east (PDF p. 42). He says the Maziya and Mahlalela submitted to Sobhuza only after the neighbouring Ndzimandze had been destroyed (p. 42).
What the books say
In a note (p. 266) Bonner says that, of the chiefdoms that survived Swazi expansion unscathed, three come from the same root, the two Maziya chiefdoms and the Mahlalela chiefdom, which seem to have had some early, undefined connection with the Dlamini, and that this presumably accounts for their favourable treatment, although the Mahlalela came close to being attacked. That fits the three-brothers tradition (Dlamini, Mahlalela and Maziya) in the Commission on Traditional Leadership Disputes and Claims’ determination on the Mahlalela; see our Mahlalela page.
Bonner’s notes cite an interview with Mphundle Maziya at Maphungwane in 1970. We found no further detail on the Maziya in the two books, and they name no Maziya chief.
Sources and cautions
This page 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 three-brothers connection is the Commission’s account for the Mahlalela together with Bonner’s note about a shared root; neither is a Maziya statement of their own history.
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.
Izithakazelo and totem
We are printing no Maziya praises or totem because none has been confirmed. If you belong to the Maziya 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)
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