Eswatini Emoji

🇸🇿 the Eswatini flag emoji shows a broad crimson band edged in yellow between two blue stripes, with a black-and-white Nguni shield laid flat across the middle over two spears and a staff hung with tassels of feathers. Like other country-code flag emojis, it is encoded as two regional indicator symbols, 🇸 and 🇿, for the country code SZ, which phones and Macs draw as the flag. Windows has no flag pictures in its emoji font and shows the letters SZ instead, but whoever opens your message on a phone still sees the flag.

The emoji was first listed as flag: Swaziland. In April 2018, at the celebrations for fifty years of independence and his own fiftieth birthday, King Mswati III announced that the country would be called by its siSwati name, Eswatini, "the land of the Swati". Emoji lists and keyboards renamed the flag, but the code SZ stayed the same, so the 🇸🇿 you send today is the very same character as before, and older keyboards may still list it under "Swaziland" while newer ones say "Eswatini".

The colours have official meanings: crimson for the battles of the past, blue for peace and stability, yellow for the country's natural resources. The shield is black and white for black and white people living together in peace, and its spears and staff are a sign of protection, not war. The design goes back to a banner King Sobhuza II gave to the Swazi Pioneer Corps who served in the Second World War. Where flags don't show, people write it as hearts, 💙💛❤️💛💙, or add 🖤🤍 for the shield.

Eswatini national symbols: the lion 🦁, the elephant 🐘 and the royal feathers 🪶

Eswatini is a kingdom 👑 with two heads of the nation. The King is the Ngwenyama, "the Lion", and his mother, who reigns beside him, is the Ndlovukati, "the Great She-Elephant". That is why a lion 🦁 and an elephant 🐘 hold up the shield 🛡️ on the coat of arms, and why 🦁🐘 together reads as the monarchy rather than a safari. Above the shield sits the lidlabe, a royal headdress of feathers, and beneath it runs the motto Siyinqaba, usually translated "We are the fortress".

🪶 is for the red feathers of the ligwalagwala, the purple-crested turaco, which are part of the royal regalia and worn in the hair by the royal family; at Umhlanga you can pick out the princesses by them. People asking for the national animal of Eswatini often get the lion and the elephant of the coat of arms, and the turaco is the national bird.

Eswatini currency symbol: lilangeni, emalangeni and E

The lilangeni (ISO code SZL) is Eswatini's currency; its plural is emalangeni, and it is divided into 100 cents. It was introduced in 1974 and is pegged one to one to the South African rand, which is legal tender in Eswatini as well, so shops take both. There is no Unicode sign for it: prices are written with a capital E for emalangeni, as in E50 or E 1,000, and banks write SZL 50. The "Eswatini currency symbol" you can copy is therefore simply the letter E; for rand amounts it is R. In chats people add 🪙, 💵 or 💰.

siSwati, the national language, is written with the plain Latin alphabet and no accents, so there are no special letters to type. Its sounds are spelled with letter groups instead: dv, tf, hl, dl, the click letters c, q and x, and the nasal ng, as in Ngwenyama. siSwati is a close relative of Zulu; where Zulu has z, siSwati often has t, so Zulu amanzi (water) is siSwati emanti. The prefixes tell you who is who: Eswatini is the country, a liSwati one person, emaSwati the people, siSwati the language. English is the other official language; for both, and for Zulu and Tsonga, which are also spoken here, see their own collections.

Umhlanga and Incwala: the Reed Dance 🌾💃 and the kingship ceremony

Umhlanga, the Reed Dance, is the best-known event of the Eswatini year. In late August or early September tens of thousands of girls and young unmarried women from all over the country go out to cut tall reeds 🌾 and carry them to Ludzidzini, the Queen Mother's royal residence near Lobamba, to repair the reed screen around it. On the final days they dance and sing 💃🎶 before the King and the Queen Mother, in groups by region, in beadwork and bright sashes. There is no reed emoji, so 🌾 stands in for it.

Incwala, the kingship or first-fruits ceremony, is the most sacred: it takes place in the summer, around December and January, timed by the moon, and renews the kingship and blesses the harvest before the King eats the first fruits of the season. Men dance in traditional dress to drums 🥁🪘 and songs that are sung only at this time. Much of Incwala is not meant to be photographed, so people mark it in messages with 👑🎶🇸🇿 rather than pictures. In late summer there is also the Buganu or Marula festival, when women brew buganu, a brew made from the fruit of the marula tree 🌳, and bring it to the royal family.

Hlane, Sibebe and the Ezulwini Valley: places and wildlife in emoji

Eswatini is small, only about 200 km from north to south, but it climbs from the misty highveld ⛰️ around Mbabane down through the middleveld to the hot lowveld and the Lubombo hills on the Mozambique border. Hlane Royal National Park is the place for lions 🦁, elephants 🐘 and white rhinos 🦏; Mkhaya Game Reserve shelters both black and white rhinos; and Mlilwane Wildlife Sanctuary, in the Ezulwini Valley, has zebras 🦓, giraffes 🦒, hippos 🦛 and crocodiles 🐊 you can see on foot, by bike or on horseback. Add 🚙🏞️ for a game drive and 🐾 for the walk.

Near Mbabane rises Sibebe 🪨, a vast bare granite dome that is among the largest in the world, and on the hills of Malolotja is the Lion Cavern at Ngwenya ⛏️, where people dug red haematite for pigment more than 40,000 years ago; it is often called the oldest known mine in the world. The Ezulwini Valley, "the Valley of Heaven", between Mbabane and Manzini, is a popular base for visitors, with the Mantenga Cultural Village and its grass beehive huts 🛖, Ngwenya Glass, which blows recycled bottles into animals, and Swazi Candles at Malkerns 🕯️, known for candles patterned like African animals.

Food, music, sport and holidays: Eswatini emoji people send

Everyday food is maize 🌽: sishwala, a stiff porridge 🥣 eaten with stew 🍲 or vegetables, and sour fermented porridge for breakfast. 🥛 is emasi, thick soured milk, much loved and often eaten with porridge; cattle 🐄 have long been the measure of wealth and are still given as lobola at marriage. Weekends mean a braai 🍖🔥, dried meat 🥩 is a snack for the road, 🍺 is traditional sorghum beer or a cold lager, and 🍍🍊 are the pineapples and citrus grown around Malkerns and in the lowveld. Swazi baskets 🧺 woven from grass and sisal are famous well beyond the country, and 👗 stands for the bright printed cloths, emahiya, worn on festive days.

Music 🎶 is everywhere, from church choirs ⛪ to the MTN Bushfire festival 🎸, held at House on Fire in Malkerns since 2007. The national football team ⚽ is called Sihlangu, "the shield". The big holidays are the King's Birthday on 19 April 🎂, the birthday of King Sobhuza II on 22 July, Umhlanga Day, and Independence Day on 6 September, also called Somhlolo Day after the 19th-century king, marking independence from Britain in 1968 🇸🇿🎉🎆. Christmas 🎄 and Easter are family holidays in a largely Christian country.