ABSTRACT
On a cold winter’s day in June 1986, David Lukhele (a cabinet minister in the former KaNgwane) was gunned down mercilessly in his home by members of Umkhonto we Sizwe’s elite ‘elimination’ unit. He was assassinated for his fervent defence of the apartheid government’s 1982 plan to cede KaNgwane (and Ingwavuma) to Swaziland, and for mobilising – against the ANC’s broader African nationalism – an unrepentantly chauvinistic Swazi ethnic nationalism deferential to ‘incorporation’ under King Sobhuza and Swaziland. Yet, the very same David Lukhele had, in 1973, come under government surveillance for mobilising landless chiefs in the Transvaal against a South African Swazi identity subservient to Sobhuza and Swaziland. This dramatic reversal in the politics of David Lukhele indexes the volatility of South African Swazi ethno-politics over the course of the twentieth century. From its beginnings in Sophiatown in 1931 to its deathly denouement in 1986, South African Swazi nationalism cultivated ethnic identification as a particularly fertile conjunctural politics of land, custom, and chiefly authority, instantiated interestingly by the insistent yearning for a Bantustan.
