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Religion and History in Eswatini

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Religion and History in Eswatini

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Eswatini, formerly known as Swaziland, is predominantly Christian today, in forms ranging from mission and mainline denominations to a large sector of African independent and Zionist type churches, but Christian practice there coexists with an older religious layer rather than having replaced it. Continuing reverence for royal and family ancestors persists alongside belief in a creator figure, Mvelinqangi, and the kingdom's best known religious institution is not a church at all: the Incwala, an annual kingship and first fruits ceremony that renews the bond between the king, the ancestors and the land.

Eswatini is governed under a dual monarchy of king, the Ngwenyama, and queen mother, the Ndlovukazi, and the Incwala is performed still today, closely bound up with national life rather than surviving only as folklore or heritage display. The ceremony's continued observance under an active monarchy makes Eswatini a rare case in this atlas of a state religious institution and an indigenous ancestral practice remaining functionally intertwined into the present rather than one having formally succeeded the other.

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Eswatini, Countries
Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Sources
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005View the Source
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