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 British have mixed success.

Their attempts to tax the Orange River Voortrekkers produce almost no revenue.

Claims to Sotho lands are met with opposition from Moshoeshoe, who in 1851 and 1852 successfully defeata British attempts to extend their authority into his lands.

As a result of the Sotho resistance, the British decide to withdraw from the Highveld, but in so doing they recognize the primacy of European rather than African claims to the land.

The Sand River Convention of 1852 and the Bloemfontein Convention of 1854 recognize the independence of the South African Republic and the Orange Free State, respectively, as Voortrekker republics so long as their residents agree to acknowledge the ultimate sovereignty of the British government, agree not to allow slavery in their territories, and agree not to sell ammunition to Africans.

Not until 1868 will the British again attempt to extend their power onto the Highveld, and this is only when Lesotho's defeat by the Orange Free State is so complete that the total destruction of the Sotho people seems likely.

British policies, however, bring about enormous destruction for the Xhosa on the eastern Cape frontier.

Smith is recalled by the British government in 1852 for instigating conflict with the Xhosa, but the Colonial Office decides to pursue the war to victory nonetheless in 1853.

Large areas of Xhosa land are annexed, and thousands of head of cattle are confiscated.

Drought and disease further reduce the Xhosa's remaining herds.

Defeated in war, their lands greatly reduced and food supplies in decline, the Xhosa turn for salvation to a young girl, Nongqawuse, who prophesies that if the people purify themselves through sacrifice—by destroying their cattle and their grain, and by not planting new crops—then their ancestors will return to aid them, the herds will reappear, and all the whites will be driven into the sea.

Although not all Xhosa believe the prophecies, by 1857 more than four hundred thousand head of cattle have been killed and vast quantities of grain have been destroyed.

As a result, forty thousand Xhosa die from starvation, and an equal number seek refuge in the Cape Colony, where most become impoverished farm laborers.

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.

Yet there are evident constraints to growth.

Economically, South Africa is little different from what it had been when the British first arrived.

The Cape produces wine, wheat, and wool, none of them particularly profitable items on the world market in the 1860s, especially because of competition from American, Argentine, and Australian farmers.

Natal's sugar keeps the colony going, but it is not an expanding industry.

In the interior, the Voortrekkers engage in the same economic activities as their African neighbors—pastoralism, limited cultivation of grain crops, and hunting—and whereas these provide a living for the people involved, they are not the basis on which an expanding economy can be built.

Perhaps the best indicator of the limited attractions of South Africa's economy is the fact that fewer Europeans emigrate here than to the United States, Canada, Australia, or even New Zealand.

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.

White settlement in South Africa is much more extensive by the end of the 1860s than it had been at the beginning of the century.

There are now two British colonies on the coast (Cape Colony and Natal) instead of one, and two Voortrekker republics on the southern and the northern Highveld (the Orange Free State and the South African Republic).

The white population has also increased considerably, from the twenty thousand or so Europeans resident in the Cape Colony in 1800 to one hundred and eighty thousand reported in the 1865 census.

There are another eighteen thousand whites living in Natal and perhaps fifty thousand more whites in the Voortrekker states.

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.

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.

A set of epic struggles to create a single unified state dominates the southern part of the African continent in the nineteenth century.

British expansion into southern Africa is fueled by three prime factors: first, the desire to control the trade routes to India that pass around the Cape; second, the discovery in 1868 of huge mineral deposits of diamonds around Kimberley on the joint borders of the South African Republic (called the Transvaal by the British), Orange Free State and the Cape Colony, and thereafter in 1886 in the Transvaal of a major gold find, all of which offer enormous wealth and power; and thirdly the race against other European colonial powers, as part of a general colonial expansion in Africa.

Other potential colonizers include Portugal, who already control West Africa (modern day Angola) and East Africa (modern day Mozambique), Germany (modern day Namibia), and further north, Belgium (modern day Democratic Republic of the Congo) and France (West and Equatorial Africa, and Madagascar).