First Impressions - Swazis and Business - Kate Holzmann - Center for International Business Studies Blog

When preparing to come to eSwatini (formerly known as Swaziland), it was hard to really picture where I’d be and what I’d be doing. I looked for videos and guides of the country on social media, and options were scarce; in all honesty, they almost made the country look fake. A few months before leaving, I learned the name of the business I’d be working at, Malandela’s Indigenous Plant Nursery. My coordinator felt that this business was an excellent placement for me in consideration of my Marketing Analytics/Consulting major and Agricultural Economics minor. Even still, I did not know much about what to expect at the company and in the country. I found their social media pages, but they had not been posted on in years and the posts were few and far between.

When being picked up from the airport, one of the workers for my trip’s host company told us about “Africa time.” Given that eSwatini is extremely small and still developing, he warned that Swazis live on “African time,” meaning that they are never in a rush to do anything. Public transportation, given in the form of “kumbis” (minibusses), will drive around and stop wherever in hopes of getting more passengers on board; it does not matter if you have places to be. This meant that people who use public transportation either need to leave an hour early or will arrive late to work and not care.

eSwatini has the highest HIV/AIDS rates in the world, causing thousands of kids to be orphans due to the early loss of their parents; it also possesses about a 40% unemployment rate and has 2 in every 3 people living on less than $2 USD per day. Malandela’s Indigenous Nursery is located on Malandela’s Estate, a location sought out by a minority of the population with more disposable income. It contains several different components: a restaurant and pub, small shops (rented out spaces), a sugarcane farm, guest suites, the Bushfire (huge annual music festival) site, the All Out Africa (tourism agency) office, and the nursery. Three different brothers run all of these aspects, and my boss was the one in charge of All Out Africa as well as the nursery. Because All Out Africa is such a widely known organization, those working around me were hardly late to work and were knee-deep in preparations for their busiest season in July. Still, I did notice that the division of tasks in the organization was quite lopsided, causing some workers to be constantly busy while others were waiting around for new duties. When duties were assigned, though, it did take people longer than normal to get things done. This meant that I would be assigned stuff to do and complete them quicker than anticipated. Because of this, I initially had a lot of free time at work but eventually came up with ideas that turned into my top priorities on my to-do list. After speaking with other interns at my program (all from France), I learned that they were experiencing and discovering the same thing at their companies- workers performing tasks at an extremely slow and inefficient pace; they were also given extremely easy tasks and ended up with nothing to do the remainder of the day. It is important to note, though, that the technologies in eSwatini are far behind those of the United States and Europe. Both me and my friends had coworkers amazed at our iPhones and Macbooks, asking us to take pictures of them with our higher-tier technologies. My boss and his three brothers, all much wealthier and more business-oriented than many Swazis, were actually from United Kingdom families- a common phenomenon in eSwatini as a result of colonization. It is important to note that despite all of this, there were still many Swazis that deserve recognition for their intelligence and business performance; moreover, there are thousands of labor workers, too, making many sacrifices in order to provide for their families.