evidence: Not much is officially remembered about KaNgwane – the ‘bantustan’ in which the apartheid vision of ‘separate development’ saw Africans designated ‘Swazi’ dumped on the least hospitable tracts of non-contiguous land in the eastern Transvaal lowveld. And there remains to date little to no detailed research and writing on the history of the former homeland.Footnote 2 Amongst the smallest, and the last to be declared ‘self-governing’, KaNgwane was born out of the political machinations of the apartheid state's so-called homelands policy. [...] This narrative combines the surface flotation (rather than deep habitation) of borderland politics with the construction of the urban as political and the rural as its apolitical other (politics flowing from one to the other). In this way it offers a mapping of the political and the spatial in the same moment as it memorializes a history of politics that is recovered and elided. Thus memory work is deeply implicated in narrativizing historicized subjectivities of space. The mnemonic practices that spatialize imaginations of what ‘the political’ is, and indeed where and how it is located, suggest the important ways in which memory work produces space, as much as narrates it. KaNgwane only exists in the imaginaries that memorialize it, and are disrupted as much as produced in that location – in defining its political nature, and in denying it.