ABSTRACT
An understanding of the dialogue/detente era in pre-Botha South Africa is important in order to understand subsequent developments. The characterization of the nineteenth-century Afrikaner state as 'a medieval race oligarchy' unequal to the task of 'rationally' deploying labour for the industrialization project was an indication of the divergent perspectives of the South African dominant classes. As African nationalism came increasingly to assert itself in Swaziland, influential sections among the immigrant capitalist farmers appealed to South Africa to take over Swaziland so as, in Cold War parlance, to 'save it from Communism'. Like the Nationalist Party in South Africa, the immigrant settler capitalist farmer group in Swaziland raised the spectre of the growth of African nationalism. A related development, attesting to the latter, is the explosion in the growth of the private security industry in recent years. Relations between South Africa and Swaziland in the post-apartheid era have displayed continuity in the economic sphere.
