Swaziland

The kingdom of Swaziland is coming to recognise the historic and 
cultural value of its older buildings. Various Christian denominations
are spearheading a movement to preserve the past as expressed through
architecture.

Art by James Hall

The preservation movement is spontaneous and uncoordinated, and seems
to come at an historic juncture where attitudes toward Africa's
colonial era are changing.  Relics left by Swaziland's old colonial
masters when the former British protectorate achieved independence
have for more than thirty years served Swazi needs.  Churches where
Africans were once excluded have seen baptisms, marriages and funerals
of several new generations, black and white.

"Everyone sees their past in these old churches," says Father Chicani,
a Catholic priest who is remodeling Swaziland's oldest existing
church, St. Joseph's Mission, erected in 1914.  "And now that they are
falling apart, there is a desire to save them as places that have
borne witness to all our lives.  These churches are the sacred stages
on which ceremonies of happiness and sorrow have been played."

It is perhaps inevitable that Swaziland's churches lead the
architectural preservation movement.  The oldest buildings in the tiny
Southern African kingdom are the churches built with a sense of
mission and optimism by religious missionaries following the
Anglo-Boer war at the beginning of the 20th century.  At the time,
colonial-era homes and government buildings were wooden or stucco
structures with sheet iron roofs.  Most of these disintegrated long
ago, or were torn down to be replaced with more permanent structures.
The typical Swazi mud and thatch hut has a lifespan of only a few
years before it disappears into the veld from which its components
came.

But Father Chicani's church was built to last, of stone.  It used
expensive concrete that had to be brought 500 miles by wagons drawn by
14 oxen.  When its iron bell first tolled on the eve of the First
World War, the ringing carried across a treeless unpopulated expanse.
"For years, every new Swazi priest was ordained here," says Father
Chicani. "When I arrived in 1957, cracks were apparent in the old
stone walls, and since then it has been non-stop repair work."

This year, St. Joseph's historic role and its rugged but picturesque
appearance will place it on tourists' itineraries when the new
restoration is completed.  The same recognition for another church is
sought by Swaziland's Catholic Bishop, the first Swazi to have reached
that ecclesiastic position.  "The oldest surviving church in the
country is our Little Flower," says Bishop Ndlovu, guiding a visitor
through the narrow nave of a compact but attractive stone church in
the heart of the kingdom's second largest city, Manzini.  "The races
were never separated here.  Black and white worshipped together.  But
when we built the Cathedral, the place became disused.  Now she is
almost 75 years old, and she has become a flower the people wish to
see again."

Bishop Ndlovu has removed a low ceiling put in place several years
ago, to expose the wooden beams and tapering rise of the roof.  The
nave is now flooded with light from a circular window once hidden by
the ill-conceived ceiling.  Only a hundred worshippers could fit into
the church's pews in its heyday, but the pastoral country's population
then was a fifth of what it is today.

About the time the Little Flower Church was dedicated in the late
1920s, the Nazarene Order received funds from America to build what
was a substantial church a few kilometres away.  Dr. Samuel Hynd, son
of Dr. David Hynd who built the Nazarene Church, was on hand at its
opening in 1930.  "The Swazi king gave us permission to bring stones
from his private hill to erect the church.  People came from miles
around to witness the raising of the bell.  For years, its tolling in
the morning and afternoon was a signal for the town's people to start
work and knock off."

Dr. Hynd recalls near calamity in 1960, when the church walls began to
sag.  "The whole structure was about to fall.  The stones were well
fitted, but they were held together only by mud.  In the 1930s, cement
was expensive and hard to come by, so it was only used on the
exterior. Mrs. Hynd and the church women scrambled to raise funds, and
they constructed some buttresses to support the walls." Forty years
later, the church faces renovation for a different reason, because of
its recognised historic significance.

Also in the early 1930s, the African Methodist Episcopal Church was
built in a hill above Manzini in what was then cattle grazing land.
Suburbs have since grown up to surround the rectangular stone church
with its square wooden belfry, and the attractive AME church is the
only religious building to have been featured on a Swaziland stamp.
Unlike the first Church of the Nazarene, which fell into disuse when a
larger church opened in 1954, and the Little Flower Church that lost
its congregation to the Catholic Cathedral when that edifice was built
in 1958, the AME Church always had a congregation.  Repair work is a
perennial task for the church committee.

Even the Catholic Cathedral, on Cathedral Way in Manzini, is showing
signs of age, although it remains a bright and spotless place of
worship in the 1950s Italian contemporary style of architecture in
which it was built.  Bishop Ndlovu, who studied for the priesthood in
Tuscany, Italy, recalls, "Brother Guilio, of the Salesian Order that
built the Catholic schools in Swaziland, used Italian craftsman for
the Cathedral.  He was a builder himself.  When it came time to hoist
the bells, which also came from Tuscany, up the bell tower, there was
no crane.  Brother Guilio tied one end of a rope to a bell inside the
tower, and the other end he tied to the bumper of his truck.  Away he
drove, and the bell was pulled up the shaft until it reached the top."

The Cathedral is a sunny African house of prayer.  "When Pope John
Paul II came to visit us in 1988," recalls Bishop Ndlovu.  "He
entered, looked around, and raised his arms and said, 'Most Cathedrals
are dark, but here you can breathe!'"

A 20-metre long mosaic of Christ the Redeemer on the facade of the
church is composed of small squares of Italian marble.  They have
started to fall off.  "It will require a trip to Italy to match them,
and to find a craftsman to put them in," says Bishop Ndlovu, who
relishes the task of keeping Swaziland's foremost religious structure
shinning bright.

The preservationist movement is not blind to unhappy history that may
have occurred within ancient walls.  The country's second oldest
church, now the Anglican church in Manzini, began in 1919 as an
interdenominational community church paid for by public subscription.
"But only whites were allowed inside," recalls Reverend Cyprian
Mahlalela.  "Even when I was ordained in 1961, there was the town
Anglican church for white people, called St. Michael's, and the one
for Africans, St. James'.  At Independence, they were combined.
People did not know if this marriage would work, but it did work."

Reverend Mahlalela is currently expanding the church.  He insists all
work must preserve the historic treasures within, like the list of
Swazis and whites from the territory who lost their lives fighting for
the British during the world wars, and the kingdom's oldest stained
glass windows put in place as remembrances of the Swaziland
territory's first white pioneers.

"Churches are supposed to be inclusive," says Rev. Mahlalela.  And
because the people in Swaziland are recognising that they share a
common history, the architectural preservation movement centered
around the churches is being widely supported as a way to honour the
best of the past.

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