Books set in Eswatini

About the literature of Eswatini

Few books by writers from Eswatini are available in English, and some of the fullest portraits of Swazi life were written by the anthropologist Hilda Kuper. The kingdom, called Swaziland until 2018, has two official languages, siSwati and English, and much of its culture, from royal ceremony to family history, has been kept alive through spoken tradition as well as in print.

Sarah Mkhonza's Weeding the Flowerbeds is a memoir of Swazi school life under authoritarian rule, showing how education, gender and power shaped ordinary lives in the late twentieth century. Kuper, who did decades of fieldwork in the kingdom, wrote The Swazi: A South African Kingdom, an ethnography of kingship, homestead life and the Incwala ceremony in the mid-twentieth century. Her play A Witch in My Heart is set in a polygamous Swazi homestead and dramatizes jealousy and witchcraft among co-wives.