DEVELOPMENT-SWAZILAND: Rural Sprawl Threatens Bucolic Kingdom

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

MBABANE, Feb 27 2002 (IPS) - Swaziland is a picturesque kingdom wedged between Mozambique and South Africa.

Its conservative people are inclined to not only hold onto their traditional leadership in a land of powerful chiefs and sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, but also onto traditional ways of life that include peasant farming and unhindered procreation.

The result is that only one-fifth of the population permanently resides in urban areas, the largest of which, Manzini, has only 80,000 people in a greater metropolitan area that includes the Matsapha Industrial Park and the University of Swaziland, both 10 kilometres away.

Township slums are relatively few, though their recent growth has challenged authorities for a solution. But with lifestyles geared to the countryside, instead of urban sprawl the kingdom suffers from a blight of “rural sprawl”, which is proving environmentally damaging, as well as a social crisis with political overtones.

“Swaziland is a unique welfare state, in that each Swazi head of household is entitled to a place to build a house, a field to grow crops, and free grazing land for his cattle. All this is acquired by pledging allegiance to a local chief, who is the king’s representative,” says sociologist Martin Shongwe of the William Pitcher College.

But Swaziland has one of the world’s highest population growth rates (currently 2.9 percent, which would be a quarter higher, health officials say, but for the devastation wrought by AIDS, whose causative virus HIV now infects a third of the population).

Good land has run out, and marginal land is being utilised to meet demand.

“We call this ‘rural sprawl’ because where once there was wilderness now as far as the eye can see are little farms, all with a little plot of maize and a branch kraal with some cattle,” says George Murdoch, who arrived in Swaziland in 1954 as an agriculture department scientist.

Roy Fanourakis, a third-generation farmer, as Minister of Agriculture has tried to convince peasant farmers to go beyond subsistence farming and learn modern techniques of irrigation and soil management with an aim at growing cash crops for export. “These farms are from the 19th century, and they are not the best way to utilise precious land,” he admits.

But Fanourakis is not calling for the abolition of small landholder farms for political reasons. Pro-democracy advocate and president of the teacher union, Phineas Magagula, says, “The monarchial system is supported in Swaziland by peasants just like it was in medieval Europe.”

“These peasants give their allegiance to palace-appointed chiefs in exchange for land to farm. Swazis are not allowed to own this land, because if they become economically independent they can be politically independent,” he says.

Magagula says as the population grows, more supporters of the royal system are given land.

Linda Dobson, secretary for the Swaziland Natural History Society, says, “Population pressures are causing serious environmental problems. Indigenous trees are disappearing as forests are plundered for firewood. Overgrazing of pasture land has caused a loss of vegetation cover, leading to soil erosion when it rains, and the pollution of rivers on which people depend for all their water.”

Dobson says that marginal land and sometimes formerly productive land has been lost to desertification, putting pressure on remaining land resources. She and the society helped the agriculture ministry draft water and forestry management legislation that imposes fines on misuse of land. But the law will not address the core problem of population growth.

Doo Apane, who is Swaziland’s National Coordinator for the Women in Law advocacy group, says, “The issue of rural sprawl would be less dire if government had a population policy. Swazis could be given incentives to have fewer children, as in other countries. A review of the custom of polygamy is long overdue.”

She says, “Population policy is inextricably tied to the rights of women. In Swaziland, women are legal minors. We cannot enter into contracts or own property. There is great resistance by the nation’s ruling patriarchy to gender equality.”

Women and Law feels that until women receive economic independence and reproductive rights they, the Swazis who are most likely to stem population growth, are prevented from doing so by social and legal constraints.

Health motivators who meet with rural residents in church halls and chiefs’ kraals routinely face hostility from male Swazis who see programmes to enlighten women on reproductive health as a conspiracy to undermine a husband’s authority over his wife.

An angry speaker at a roadside meeting conducted by ‘The AIDS Support Centre (TASC)’ in rural Hhelehhele opined, “Women were put on earth to make babies, it is in the Bible, and any wife who is physically able but does not give birth will face the wrath of God.”

Patiently, Lindiwe Dlamini-Mkhatshwa, a counsellor with TASC, explained, “We do not challenge a husband’s authority, but if we do not ensure a mother’s health and her children’s well-being, we are also answerable to God.”

It transpired that the man was having difficulty making his small landholder farm profitable, and he saw more children, potential workers, as a solution. Agriculture ministry field workers are seeking to change such attitudes by promoting farming cooperatives and modern farming techniques that are less labour-intensive.

But still Swazis will insist on homestead land as their birthright, a claim now impossible to meet while too politically and socially disruptive to deny.

“It is not anything we have done that has lowered the population growth rate from 3.6 percent ten years ago to 2.9 percent today,” says health motivator Abigale Kunene. “AIDS has done that for us. But still the people multiply.”

The phenomenon of “rural sprawl”, extending poverty over formerly pristine land, is the result.