of the British irregular force Steinacker's Horse at Bremersdorp in July 1901. Labotsibeni had apparently called in the Boers to remove this troublesome group of freebooters and to release Prince Mancibane, a member of the royal family whom the British had detained on suspicion of spying, but she regretted the Boers' destruction of the small town. As the war came to an end, Labotsibeni and the Swazi council hoped for the establishment of a British protectorate. They were disappointed by Lord Milner's initial decision that Swaziland should be administered through the Transvaal. Labotsibeni and her council protested strongly against the terms of the Swaziland order in council of 1903 and the Swaziland administration proclamation of 1904, which set up the machinery of government under a resident commissioner. Prince Malunge led a Swazi deputation to meet Milner's successor as high commissioner, Lord Selborne, in Pretoria in 1905, to protest over these and other issues, and Selborne himself paid a visit to Swaziland in September 1906. On that occasion he announced that the administration of Swaziland would, in view of the imminent restoration of self-government to the Transvaal, be transferred to the high commissioner. 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. Regency under Britain Labotsibeni and her council also protested vigorously against the terms of the land partition, which was proclaimed in 1907, and subsequently carried out by George Grey, brother of the Liberal cabinet minister Sir Edward Grey. This divided Swaziland between the Swazi nation, the white concessionaires, and the British crown. 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’. He was not, however, able to get support from his superiors for a plan to depose Labotsibeni and replace her by Mona, the infant heir. 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). Prince Malunge was the effective leader of a Swazi deputation to London, which met the