On September 6, 1968, Swaziland became independent from Britain, ending 65 years as a British protectorate. King Sobhuza II was head of state. He had already reigned since 1921. The constitution was negotiated in London. There were two capitals. Mbabane handled administration. Lobamba had the royal and legislative institutions.
The Swazi kingdom had signed away large parts of its land in the last decades of the nineteenth century, mostly through concession documents granted to speculators and gold prospectors that were later ruled to be land sales. Britain took over the territory's administration from the South African Republic after the Second Boer War in 1902 and confirmed it as a protectorate in 1906. Nearly a third of the land remained in European freehold title at independence, and the return and purchase of that land was a central issue in the negotiations.
What made the 1968 settlement fragile was that it tried to fit a kingship with its own institutions inside a Westminster-style constitution. Sobhuza had watched the neighbouring High Commission territories become Botswana and Lesotho as party-political states, and he did not intend that. In 1973 he repealed the constitution. He banned political parties. He dissolved parliament. He ruled by decree, with the traditional councils and the Swazi National Council as the basis of government. That arrangement has not been reversed.
Sobhuza died in 1982 after nearly 61 years on the throne, one of the longest reigns of any monarch in the twentieth century. His son Mswati III succeeded him in 1986 and, in April 2018, announced that the country's name was changing from Swaziland to Eswatini, the form used in Swazi, marking 50 years of independence.
Eswatini is now generally described as the last absolute monarchy in Africa. Political parties remain banned, and the king appoints the prime minister and part of both chambers of parliament.