“My name is Nonhlanhla from the Eswatini Rural Women’s Assembly. I live in the Mbandeni community — on a farm we were allocated by local authorities through the Gukonta system. We were told to pay a cow or money equal to a cow, or even more, to settle there.
But we don’t own this land. That’s the real problem. Even though we live here, farm here, and raise our families here, we cannot develop anything — not a school, not a clinic, not even a water tank for our animals — because we have no legal proof of ownership. When we face disasters, like fire, we are turned away by the national disaster management — because there is no proof that this land is ours.
When we try to find the landowner, we’re sent in circles. One elder says it’s owned by this person, that person points to another. You can travel the whole country and never find the true owner. Meanwhile, we have no help. Our children walk long distances to school. We have no clinic, no development, and no government support.
Women here live in fear. I have seen airplanes flying low over our homes, white men with dogs patrolling the land. We know what that means — evictions. We’ve seen bulldozers demolishing homes in nearby farms. We know it can happen to us any day. That’s why we don’t even sleep in peace.
Some of the women here built homes with 10 rooms — mud houses, brick houses — believing we could start new lives. But now, it’s all at risk. We are mostly widows, pensioners. We have no strength or money to start again. It’s painful.
There are nearly 1,000 homesteads in Mbandeni, and more people are still being allocated land — even though it’s privately owned. Women can’t access basic health care. We have to pay for transport to distant clinics. Our reproductive health rights, our food, our safety — they’re all tied to this land we do not own.
We tried to trace the landowners all the way to China, just to ask if we could buy the land. But nothing has worked. The Swaziland Rural Women’s Assembly has helped us understand our rights, but the process is long and hard. We are just asking the government to do something. We are desperate.”
