This conflict, in which her father was embroiled at the time of her birth, was part of King Mswati II’s ongoing efforts to solidify his rule and consolidate the boundaries of his kingdom.
[4] Historian Hilda Kuper notes that growing up in the royal palace afforded her the advantage of acquiring “knowledge of court etiquette, insights into the political dynamics of the era, and a sense of self-assurance”.
[5] Labotsibeni's husband, King Mbandzeni (also known as Dlamini IV) was described as an attractive person, and an essentially fair-minded ruler, who was unable to stop, and may indeed have encouraged, the army of concession-hunters who invaded his country in the wake of the gold rush to Barberton in the late 1880s.
By the time of his death in October 1889 he had granted numerous overlapping and conflicting land concessions, and a variety of equally contentious monopolies, including one which purported to give its holder the right to collect ‘the king's private revenue’.
They had the effect of involving the governments of Great Britain and the South African Republic (the Transvaal) in the affairs of Swaziland in support of the competing claims of their citizens.
It was at this time that Labotsibeni emerged as a remarkably intelligent, articulate, and astute spokesperson for the Swazi nation; she dominated the debate at indabas, and got the better of the argument at meetings with such representatives of the Transvaal as the vice-president, N. J. Smit, and the commandant-general, Piet Joubert, as well as with the republic's special commissioner in Swaziland, J. C. Krogh, and successive British consuls in Swaziland, James Stuart and Johannes Smuts.
As queen mother she was, in terms of the unwritten constitution of the country, a dual monarch with political influence equal to that of the king, and with the supernatural power to make rain.
He was saved from deposition by the intervention of the British high commissioner in South Africa, Lord Milner, who held that the Transvaal's attempt to try him was ultra vires.
Britain and the Transvaal then combined to add a protocol to the Swaziland convention that purported to reduce his status from king to paramount chief, and removed his powers of criminal jurisdiction.
On the outbreak of the South African War in October 1899 the Transvaal's special commissioner, J. C. Krogh, and the British consul, Johannes Smuts, withdrew from Swaziland.
As a result of Labotsibeni's pressure, the threat posed by the recent Zulu uprising, and the still unresolved issue of the land concessions, Swaziland thus became a high commission territory like Bechuanaland and Basutoland, though it was never formally declared to be a British protectorate.
Robert Coryndon, who was brought in from north-western Rhodesia as resident commissioner in that year, sought to take a hard line with Labotsibeni, Malunge, and those whom he described as ‘the Zombodze faction’.
After a year in office Coryndon described Labotsibeni as ‘a woman of extraordinary diplomatic ability and strength of character, an experienced and capable opposition with which it [the administration] was for some time incapable of dealing’ (Jones, 402).
Three years after the return of the deputation, Labotsibeni and Malunge became, with the consent of Coryndon, the prime movers behind a national fund to buy back land—a move that seems to have drawn a little of the bitterness from the issue.
Prince Malunge attended the conference that was held by the South African Natives National Congress in Kimberley in February 1914 to discuss the response to the Land Act, and was treated as the most distinguished delegate.
Labotsibeni's last major contribution as queen regent was her insistence, in spite of some opposition, that Mona, the heir to the throne, should receive the best education then available to a black person in southern Africa.