The Swazi kings of Eswatini date back to some considerable time to when the Royal line of Dlamini lived in the vicinity of Delagoa Bay.

The Swazi people as a nation were originally formed by sixteen clans known as bemdzabuko ("true Swazi" ) who had accompanied the Dlamini kings in the early days.

The fifteen founding clans were Dlamini, Nhlabathi, Hlophe, Kunene, Mabuza, Madvonsela, Mamba, Matsebula, Mdluli, Motsa, Ngwenya, Shongwe, Sukati, Tsabedze, Tfwala and Zwane.

Other Swazi clans are the Emakhandzambili clans ("those found ahead", e.g. the Gamedze, Fakudze, Ngcamphalala and Magagula), meaning that they were on the land prior to Dlamini immigration and conquest.

The Emafikemuva ("those who came behind") join the kingdom later. 

The Swazi settlers, known as the Ngwane (or bakaNgwane) before entering present Eswatini, had been settled on the banks of the Pongola River.

Before that, they had been settled in the area of the Tembe River near present-day Maputo, Mozambique.

Continuing conflict with the Ndwandwe people had pushed them further north, with Ngwane III establishing his capital at Shiselweni at the foot of the Mhlosheni hills.

Under Sobhuza I, the Ngwane people eventually established their capital at Zombodze in the heartland of present-day Eswatini.

In this process, they conquered and incorporated the long-established clans of the country known to the Swazi as Emakhandzambili.

Eswatini derives its name from a later king named Mswati II.

KaNgwane, named for Ngwane III, is an alternative name for Eswatini, the surname of whose royal house remains Nkhosi Dlamini.

Nkhosi literally means "king".

In the late 1830s, initial contact occurred with the Boers, who had defeated the Zulus at the Battle of Blood River, and were settling in the territory that would become the South African Republic.

To establish a peaceful coexistence, a substantial portion of Swazi territory is ceded to the Transvaal Boers who are settled around the Lydenburg area in the 1840s.

The territory of Swaziland and its king, Mswati II, are recognized by both the Transvaal and by Britain.

The Swazi nation is further unified during the rule of Mswati II and the people and their country became known as they are today.

Hereafter, the label "Swazi" eventually will be applied to all the peoples who give allegiance to the Ingwenyama.

Mswati II is the greatest of the fighting kings of Eswatini, and he greatly extends the area of the country to twice its current size.

The Emakhandzambili clans are initially incorporated into the kingdom with wide autonomy, often including grants of special ritual and political status.

The extent of their autonomy, however, is drastically curtailed by Mswati, who attacks and subdues some of them in the 1850s.

While reducing the influence of the Emakhandzambili, Mswati incorporates additional people into his kingdom either through conquest or by giving them refuge.

These later arrivals will become known to the Swazis as Emafikamuva.

Moreover, areas of white and black settlement and political control are largely separate.

In 1865 the Cape contains two hundred thousand Khoikhoi and people of mixed ancestry (the basis of today's Cape Coloured population), as well as one hundred thousand Bantu speakers.

Several hundred thousand blacks live in Natal and in the Voortrekker republics.

The vast majority of South Africa's black inhabitants, however, continue to live in independent African states ruled by their own kings and chiefs.

In the 1860s, Mpande's Zululand is a still powerful state in which most Zulus live.

Moshoeshoe's Lesotho, although it had been attacked by the Orange Free State and its borders contracted, contains most of the Sotho people.

To the northeast of the South African Republic, the Pedi (Northern Sotho) under their king Sekhukhune have a well-armed state, and the Swazi kingdom continues to be a powerful entity.

Any observer traveling in South Africa in the late 1860s would have had little reason to assume that this balance of power between blacks and whites will change dramatically during the remainder of the nineteenth century.

Mineral discoveries in southern Africa in the 1860s, the 1870s, and the 1880s have an enormous impact on the region.

Diamonds had initially been identified in 1867 in an area adjoining the confluence of the Vaal and the Orange rivers, just north of the Cape Colony, although it was not until 1869 to 1870 that finds were sufficient to attract a "rush" of several thousand fortune hunters.

The British government, attracted by the prospect of mineral wealth, had quickly annexed the diamond fields, repudiating the claims of the Voortrekker republics to the area.

Four mines were developed, and the town of Kimberley had been established.

The town has grown quickly to became the largest urban society in the interior of southern Africa in the 1870s and the 1880s.

Although the mines were worked initially by small-scale claims- holders, the economics of diamond production and marketing soon lead to consolidation.

Within two decades of the first diamond find, the industry is essentially controlled by one monopolistic company—Cecil Rhodes's De Beers Consolidated Mines.

Many commercial, land, and mining concessions in Swaziland have been granted to British and Boer settlers, leading to further loss of Swazi territory to the South African Republic.

The result is that a substantial Swazi population has ended up residing outside Swaziland in South Africa.

The Pretoria Convention for the Settlement of the Transvaal in 1881 recognizes the independence of Swaziland and defines its boundaries.

The Ngwenyama is not a signatory, and the Swazi claim that their territory extends in all directions from the present state.

Africans participate actively in the new industrial economy.

Thousands had come to Kimberley in the early 1870s, some to obtain diamond claims, the majority to seek jobs in the mines and thereby to acquire the cash that would enable them to rebuild cattle herds depleted by drought, disease, and Boer raids.

n the early 1870s, an average of fifty thousand men a year had migrated to work in the mines, usually for two to three months, returning home with guns purchased in Kimberley, as well as cattle and cash.

Many who lived in the area of the diamond finds had chosen to sell agricultural surpluses, rather than their labor, and to invest their considerable profits in increasing production for the growing urban market.

African farmers in British Basutoland (the British protectorate established in Lesotho), the Cape, and Natal had also greatly expanded their production of foodstuffs to meet rising demand throughout southern Africa, and out of this development has emerged a relatively prosperous peasantry supplying the new towns of the interior as well as the coastal ports.

The growth of Kimberley and other towns also provide new economic opportunities for Cape Coloureds, many of whom are skilled tradesmen, and for Indians, who, once they had completed their contracts on the sugar plantations, establish shops selling goods to African customers.

Mineowners struggling to make a profit in the early days of the diamond industry had sought, however, to undercut the bargaining strength of the Africans on whom they depended for labor.

In 1872 Kimberley's white claimsholders had persuaded the British colonial administration to introduce a pass law.

This law, the foundation of the twentieth-century South African pass laws, required that all "servants" be in possession of passes that stated whether the holders were legally entitled to work in the city, whether or not they had completed their contractual obligations, and whether they could leave the city.

The aim of this law, written in "color-blind" language but enforced against blacks only, was to limit the mobility of migrant workers, who had frequently changed employers or left the diamond fields in a constant (and usually successful) attempt to bargain wages upward.

Other restrictions have followed the pass law.

These include the establishment of special courts to process pass law offenders as rapidly as possible (the basis of segregated courts in the twentieth century), the laying out of special "locations" or ghettos in Kimberley where urban blacks had to live (the basis of municipal segregation practices), and, finally, in 1886 the formation of "closed compounds," fenced and guarded institutions in which all black diamond mine workers have to live for the duration of their labor contracts.

The institutionalization of such discriminatory practices has produced in Kimberley the highest rate of incarceration and the lowest living standards for urban blacks in the Cape Colony.

It also marks a major turnabout in the British administration of law.

The previous official policy that all people irrespective of color be treated equally, while still accepted in legal theory, is now largely ignored in judicial practice.

South Africa's first industrial city has thus developed into a community in which discrimination has become entrenched in the economic and social order, not because of racial antipathies formed on the frontier, but because of the desire for cheap labor.

Because blacks in southern Africa will not put up with such conditions if they can maintain an autonomous existence on their own lands, the British had embarked on a large-scale program of conquest in the 1870s and the 1880s.

Mine owners argue that if they do not get cheap labor their industries will become unprofitable.

White farmers, English- and Dutch-speaking alike, interested in expanding their own production for new urban markets, cannot compete with the wages paid at the mines and demand hat blacks be forced to work for them.

They argue that if blacks have to pay taxes in cash and that if most of their lands are confiscated, they will then have to seek work on the terms that white employers chosoe to offer.

As a result of such pressures, the British have fought wars against the Zulu, the Griqua, the Tswana, the Xhosa, the Pedi, and the Sotho, conquering all but the last.

By the middle of the 1880s, the majority of the black African population of South Africa that had still been independent in 1870 had been defeated, the bulk of their lands had been confiscated and given to white settlers, and taxes had been imposed on the people, who are now forced to live on rural "locations."

In order to acquire food to survive and to earn cash to pay taxes, blacks now have to migrate to work on the farms, in the mines, and in the towns of newly industrialized South Africa.