Dumping Ground

According to prominent Swati magazine the Nation, Swati correctional services cynically appealed to prisoners’ privacy rights and refused to release names, further undermining efforts to shed light on what happened. One of them has been identified by the New York Times: Orville Etoria, sixty-two, a Jamaican national, had been out of prison since 2021, and was allowed to stay in the United States as long as he showed up for annual check-ins with immigration.

The deportees’ lawyer in Eswatini, Sibusiso Nhlabatsi, told me that as of September 3, he has still been denied access to them — a major violation of their rights. While he could not verify the conditions of detention, a recent report released in July by a government-appointed commission found that Swati prisons are overcrowded.

Melusi Simelane, civic rights program manager at the Southern Africa Litigation Centre, joined the Eswatini Litigation Centre and the Swaziland Rural Women’s Assembly in a legal challenge to the deportation deal submitted to the country’s High Court. The application argues that the Swati parliament was not informed, breaking the constitutional provision that all international agreements must be ratified by parliament.

As Simelane told me:

This is about democratic values and neocolonialism, Africa has been used as a dumping ground. The Global North is targeting countries with weaker democratic safeguards such as Eswatini, South Sudan, Uganda, and Rwanda. We can’t allow this to happen.

This essentially sums up the Trump team’s rationale for choosing the kingdom: if you want to disappear people, making it hard for even their most basic rights to be respected, then sending them to a distant country with a poor human rights record is your best bet.

It is unclear what Eswatini stands to gain from the arrangement. For commentators who support the ruling monarchy, one symbolic victory was the fact that Donald Trump’s tariffs frenzy left the country untouched. The baseline tariff in effect before “Liberation Day” remains in place, while South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, and other countries in the region were hit by varying increases.

However, the main trade advantages for Swati exports come under the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which guarantees tariff-free entry into the United States for Eswatini’s apparel, raw sugar, and other agricultural products. AGOA expires on September 30, and it is unclear whether it will continue or whether the country will be included in a renewal.

There is no reversal in sight for the drastic cuts to United States Agency for International Development (USAID) programs that funded a granular health infrastructure for HIV testing and antiretroviral drugs in a country with the highest HIV prevalence rate in the world. The burden of disease further aggravates the struggling conditions of the majority. Seventy-nine percent live on $8.30 a day or less. The general unemployment rate is at 34 percent, rising to 58 percent among young people — a significant indicator of the country’s deep crisis as more than half of the population is under twenty-five.

From Oligarchy to Dictatorship

This landlocked country of 1.1 million people, surrounded by South Africa and Mozambique, is ruled by an indigenous royal family that operates under an ideology of “customary nationalism,” based on the adaptation of precolonial customs that originated with the birth of the Swati nation to colonial and postcolonial conditions. Customary law (largely oral) is run in parallel with Roman-Dutch law, brought in by the British in 1903, when they formally colonized the country. The British subordinated the former to the latter, and the postcolonial regime reversed this relationship.

In 1973, King Sobhuza II suspended the constitution and banned political parties. Despite this, parliamentary elections in the tinkhundla electoral districts continued, but this meant individual candidates running without formal political affiliations. The system of formal courts outside the customary realm remained in place, possessing some autonomy from the king.

The rule of chiefs over customary land in rural areas carried on from colonial times, and rural residents provided the bulk of royalist support. Progressive, prodemocratic forces were concentrated in the urban areas in the center of the country. They also cultivated support in some rural areas with high levels of proletarianization in the east, where the sugar industry is most prominent; sugar is the country’s largest export, with Europe, South Africa, and the United States among the top destinations.

Until recently, the royal regime included hundreds of senior members (princes and princesses of some standing), allied with some of the more powerful local chiefs. This was an oligarchy with distributed ties to significant sectors of the population, especially in the rural areas, that reproduced royal hegemony through co-option and consensus, relying only partially on outright coercion.

Trade unions were not banned and played an important role in pursuing workers’ struggles alongside democratic demands. Although there was some space for political freedom, exemplified by several waves of mass protests led by the unions, the royal regime actively targeted activists and movements in urban areas to suppress their organizing.

Historically, the working classes found themselves caught between the two systems: they worked in urban areas with a modicum of rights set by Roman-Dutch law, while maintaining their ties to rural areas where they could afford to get land cheaply from chiefs. This land cannot be sold on the private market, but it can be held in indefinite usufruct and passed on to close relatives, so long as it remains occupied. Private property that can be bought and sold on the market has always been unaffordable to the vast majority of Swati workers.

Profiting From Apartheid

The king has been at the head of both systems, guaranteeing some level of social protection in the form of land through the chiefs, while partnering with multinational capital in the formal economy. Nowhere was this contradictory position more evident than in the relationship with the South African apartheid regime.

The royal family let South African capital and its international allies run large parts of the country’s agricultural, manufacturing, and service sectors. Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, it also allowed the African National Congress (ANC) to run operations from Eswatini, while turning a blind eye to the presence of apartheid security forces targeting ANC activists. At the end of the 1980s, the country benefited from US and European sanctions against the apartheid regime because many South African industries relocated to Eswatini to evade the sanctions and continue trading in the international system.

The current king, Mswati III, was installed in 1986. At the start of his rule, he largely followed in the footsteps of his father, Sobhuza. However, over the decades, capital accumulation and state power became increasingly centralized in Mswati’s hands and a small circle of close relatives and cronies, gradually transforming a system of royal oligarchy into a full-blown one-man dictatorship.

The culmination of this process was the massacre of more than seventy people in June and July 2021, with several hundreds more maimed, tortured, and imprisoned. The killings came after widespread riots that reached across the whole country, including rural areas that had traditionally been shielded from mass protests and prodemocracy mobilization.

Before the riots, thousands of people had marched peacefully across the country to deliver petitions to their local tinkhundla offices. The main demand was for direct popular election of the prime minister. A variety of social and economic issues were also raised, including demands for jobs, university scholarships, better infrastructure, and improved health care.

Since then, the state security forces have launched a wholesale program of mass repression. Thulani Maseko, an activist lawyer who had previously been imprisoned for raising concerns about the independence and integrity of the judiciary, was shot and killed in his home in January 2023. No arrests have been made over the killing, and the police force has done little to advance the investigations.

In July 2024, Mduduzi Bacede Mabuza and Mthandeni Dube, two former MPs who had supported the prodemocracy movement since 2021, were sentenced to twenty-five and eighteen years of prison, respectively, for their activism. Civil society and prodemocracy movements continue to mobilize, with members operating from exile in neighboring South Africa, where they have more logistical support from progressive movements. However, their efficacy remains limited due to intense repression and general lack of support from other governments in the southern African region.

Racial Capitalism

An important part of the story is the long-standing economic alliance between the king and the local white community, which operates as a broker between the monarchy and multinational capital. The sugar industry’s biggest player is the Royal Eswatini Sugar Corporation (RES).

The king’s national investment trust fund Tibiyo Taka Ngwane is the majority shareholder of RES, while the South African company RCL Foods owns nearly 30 percent. RCL Foods is, in turn, majority-owned by Remgro, which is connected to Afrikaner billionaire Johann Rupert, son of the apartheid-era business tycoon Anton Rupert.

RES operates two of the three sugar mills in the country. The third is run by Ubombo Sugar, majority-owned by Illovo Sugar Africa, in partnership with the king via the Tibiyo fund. Illovo is wholly owned by Associated British Foods, incorporated in the UK, and produces sugar in six other southern African countries.

A significant part of the local white population is English-speaking and of British settler origin, while others are Afrikaners who trace their origins to the Dutch who arrived at the Cape of Good Hope in 1652. Over the years, other white people have joined this tightly knit community from elsewhere in southern Africa and from Western countries.

Local whites are prominent in top management positions in bigger companies and as owners and managers of small- and medium-scale businesses. Colonial privilege continues: whites still command authority and prestige derived from deeply entrenched racial attitudes fostered by apartheid and British colonialism. They receive disproportionately high salaries compared to equally skilled black workers and managers. The names of prominent local white businesspeople featured in the Panama Papers.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of black workers live on wages that are not enough to cover basic needs. As in colonial times, maize subsistence activities in rural areas subsidize the highly inadequate wages in the formal economy. For instance, the state-mandated minimum wage in the agricultural sector for an entry-level worker is around US $110 a month — less than a third of that in South Africa.

For the most part, whites have kept a low public profile to avoid scrutiny and deflect attention from their vast wealth and privilege. Eswatini’s minister of finance, Neal Rijkenberg, is a notable exception. A white Afrikaner, Rijkenberg built up Montigny, the biggest timber operator in the country.

His close alliance with the king started when two public pension funds bought significant shares in the company in 2014. In 2017, the king appointed Rijkenberg to the main committee of the royal fund Tibiyo. He later made him chairman of Silulu Royal Holdings, a private company owned by the king that has been accused of alienating land from ordinary citizens to favor commercial farming interests. In 2018, Rijkenberg became minister of finance, a position that he has held since.

Born-Again Businessmen

As an International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) investigation put it, Rijkenberg is not only “an ardent believer in the free market,” but also a “born-again Christian” — an evangelical in American terms. He helped found Bulembu Ministries, a Christian utopian project based in the eponymous town in the northwest of the country.

A group of evangelical businesspeople (largely white men from Eswatini and Canada) bought a semi-abandoned town that was once home to the largest asbestos mine in southern Africa. They proceeded to develop it as a site for foster care of Swati orphans, alongside not-for-profit business activities employing Swati workers.

I lived and carried out research in Bulembu between 2007 and 2008 and continued to do research on the country after that. Rijkenberg played a key role, alongside his close business partners from Montigny. At the time of my research, the biggest employer in Bulembu was a timber-processing plant that was integrated into Montigny’s national operations.

Rijkenberg and his Bulembu associates shared more than a surface similarity with the right-wing Christian sections of Trump’s voter base. They are broadly part of the same racial milieu that Trump has been addressing in South Africa with his propaganda on “genocide” among white farmers and the white South African refugee program. Bulembu whites maintained strong ties with white evangelical churches in the United States, as white Americans traveled to places like Bulembu to “save” poor Africans.

These ties continue to the present, and the current website lists offices in the United States, Canada, and the UK. One American organization that supports Bulembu is Partners in Action, an evangelical Christian nonprofit based in Arizona. Ideologically aligning with Trump’s latest anti-LGBTQ policies, their statement of faith says that “God created man and woman as unique biological persons made to complete each other” and “marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.”

Bulembu business missionaries were, for the most part, conservative Christians who believed that God entrusted them with the mission of saving the souls of black children orphaned by the HIV crisis — largely because of, in their understanding, the sinful behavior of their black parents. This is what justified the exploitation of adult black workers.

In contrast with their attitude to orphans, most missionaries did not believe workers could be saved. It was not the job of the missionaries to improve the conditions that the God-given free market had provided for them. Black timber employees in particular worked in dangerous conditions, received meager salaries, and lived in substandard accommodation.

Most black workers with whom I spoke felt that the white managers were not treating them with human dignity and that they perpetuated racial discrimination from colonial and apartheid times. During our conversations, one of my key participants was a black worker involved in labor organizing against Bulembu management, who stressed that white managers did not feel the pain of Swati workers. He charged black politicians and rich people close to the monarchy with the same lack of empathy: they, too, “don’t feel the pain of others.”

Colonial Collusion

Those words hit the nail on the head. The king and his cronies have lost empathy for their citizens, with whom they share a history of racial discrimination — even if the effects are highly uneven because of class differences. They have no qualms about colluding in human rights violations against the victims of Trump’s hate-fueled deportation drive.

Documents reviewed by the New York Times indicate that the Eswatini government was open to receiving more than 150 people from the United States in return for over $10 million. To make it worse, Eswatini officials asked the US government if there was an expectation that local officials would put the deportees on trial and sentence them once landed in the kingdom.

This echoes the track record of Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, who has been looting the Democratic Repubic of the Congo’s rich mineral resources, bringing destabilization and armed conflict to the neighboring country — very much like what Western powers have done for hundreds of years, and still do through proxies such as Kagame. It is no surprise that the Rwandan leader has also signed a deportation deal with the United States, with seven people already landed in Kigali earlier in August.

The brave activists and lawyers who are now fighting for the rights of the deportees in Eswatini and other African countries are not upholding some abstract notion of human rights as a vestige of a collapsing liberal world order, as far-right propaganda would have us believe. They are fighting for justice, to end practices that perpetuate the centuries-long brutality and dehumanization of people of color and those from non-Western backgrounds more generally.

Today’s deportations remind us of many past atrocities: from extraordinary renditions during the Bush administration’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to the abductions of anti-apartheid activists by South African forces, or the desaparecidos of the Chilean and Argentinian fascist dictatorships of the 1970s and ’80s, whose bodies are yet to be found.

The only Africans Trump will partner with are those who embrace his colonial, supremacist vision of the world. The suffering of Swati citizens at the hands of the monarchy and its rapacious capitalist allies is not separate from the plight of migrants and refugees facing inhumane treatment in the United States and beyond.

The many African countries that still have solid democracies and strong legal institutions should not keep quiet and must honor the African Union’s theme for 2025: Justice for Africans and People of African Descent Through Reparations. Likewise, progressive movements in America and Europe should find ways to help Swati activists in the pursuit of justice, while resisting the spread of dehumanizing practices by their home governments.