Eswatini document photos online

In April 2018, on the 50th anniversary of independence and his own 50th birthday, King Mswati III scrapped the name his country had carried since British rule: Swaziland became the Kingdom of Eswatini, "land of the Swazis." The monarch had grown tired of one persistent annoyance abroad: "Whenever we go abroad, people refer to us as Switzerland." Overnight, every passport, embassy plate and official document had to be reissued under the new name. It made Eswatini one of the few nations on Earth to rebrand itself partly to stop being mistaken for somewhere else entirely.

• Name change Eswatini is one of the very few countries to rename itself partly to end confusion with another nation, after King Mswati III complained that travelers abroad kept mistaking Swaziland for Switzerland.
• Monarchy Ruled by King Mswati III since 1986, Eswatini is Africa's last absolute monarchy, where the king appoints the prime minister and ministers and political parties have effectively been banned since 1973.
• Citizenship Under the constitution, citizenship by birth passes only through a Swazi father, and a Swazi woman cannot pass nationality to a foreign husband, making descent rules unusually patrilineal.
• Currency The currency is the lilangeni (plural emalangeni), a Swati word linked to "emaLangeni," the "people of the Sun" who are the ancestors of the Swazi nation.
• Currency peg The lilangeni has been locked at exactly 1:1 with the South African rand since 1974, and the rand itself circulates as legal tender across the four-country Common Monetary Area.
• Banknotes Swazi banknotes carry the portrait of King Mswati III and depict scenes such as the sacred Ncwala kingship ceremony and traditional Swazi straw beehive huts.
• Oldest mine The Ngwenya Mine near the western border is regarded as the world's oldest known mine, with hematite extracted there for red ochre as far back as roughly 41,000 to 43,000 years ago.
• Two capitals Tiny Eswatini runs two capitals: Mbabane is the administrative seat, while Lobamba is the royal and legislative capital home to parliament and the Queen Mother's residence.
• Passport In 2026 the government agreed to roll out 500,000 biometric ePassports with modern chip and cryptographic security, modernizing a travel document that ranks around 71st worldwide.