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SWAZI SECRETS is the range of natural oils and associated cosmetics produced by Swazi Indigenous Products, a community owned, not for profit Company set up to empower rural Swazi women. The products are based on oil produced from the kernels of marula, the King of African trees. THE AIM is to create a viable community owned natural products company in Swaziland in accordance with the highest standards of Fair Trade, environmental sustainability and ethical biotrade. The Magic of MarulaThe natural world possesses wonderful solutions to keep our bodies healthy, both inside and outside. Particularly for those of you with busy urban lifestyles, we aim to bring natural healthy solutions for the care of your skin while boosting the incomes of poor, rural women at the same time. marula tree This is the story of how Swazi Secrets Marula Oil makes its way from the tree to your skin.
Around February each year, the tree drops its green, plum sized fruits to the ground where they are avidly eaten by children and animals or collected by local women for their many other properties. Marula fruit actually contain four times as much Vitamin C as oranges! Many find their way into a local brew, called buganu here in Swaziland. As elephants well know, it has powerful alcoholic properties, partly due to the 29 different yeasts present in the skin! For much of March and April, the informal buganu sales cause brewery sales to plummet. The occasion is recognised by the Buganu Tasting Ceremonies when people come from hundreds of kilometres around to bring their first brews for the King and Queen Mother to sample. The brew is widely acknowledged to possess powerful aphrodisiac qualities too – indeed marula is known to the Zulu as the marriage tree. Having gained one source of income from the marula beer, the women now put the nuts out in the sun to dry, getting ready to have their ‘second bite at the marula’. By late March the nuts are dry and ready to crack – a tough manual task using stones as the nuts have thus far defied the best engineering brains trying to find a better mechanical way.
From the collection points, the kernels are taken back to the Company’s Mpaka factory where they are pressed to produce Swazi Secrets Marula Oil. There are a few more steps along the way, however, to make sure that what reaches your skin is as pure and natural as possible. When ready to press, the kernels are lightly warmed to around 35 deg C before being loaded into a manual bridge press. The locally produced technology may appear basic but it is necessary to ensure the production of a cold pressed, unrefined, virgin oil. This method yields around 30% oil from the kernels. It is then left to settle before being decanted into containers for cold storage until it is removed for bottling. Why so much trouble to preserve all the natural qualities of the oil?
We aim to retain all of these qualities in the oil that reaches your skin. While much of our oil is sold in that pure, natural state, we also use some of it to produce a small range of cosmetics.For example, we produce a hand made marula soap which gives a wonderful creamy lather. As you might expect with over 40% marula oil content, it possesses many of the same skin qualities as the oil itself. Presently, we also produce a Marula facial scrub, hand and body lotion, lip balm, shampoo and shower gel. We keep the formulations fairly simple – as nature intended. From Nature to You, with loving care Empowering Swazi Women
Swazi Secrets began life as the Swazi Queen Mother’s dream – a dream to help poor rural Swazi women to generate an income from the natural products that grow around them. cracking marula nuts Poverty is still widespread in Swaziland but so too is natural woodland, retaining a marvellous biodiversity of indigenous plants and trees. As elsewhere in the world, that biodiversity is under threat. Such has been the backdrop for the formation of Swazi Indigenous Products – a not for profit Company seeking to build a natural products industry against a background of challenges:
Those challenges are being met, thanks to generous support from the WK Kellogg Foundation and the Swazi Government. We operate from a factory in Mpaka, in the heart of the Swazi lowveld, producing a range of quality natural cosmetics products. The initial focus was on marula oil and its superb skin qualities but the factory now produces a range of oils, including those from the seeds of trichilia emetica and ximenia caffra. Marula has long been known as the King of African trees – for good reason. Click here to find out more on the magic of marula. The global cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries are increasingly making use of the properties of marula oil. Meanwhile, you can buy the secrets of the Swazi veld - pure, cold pressed, unrefined marula oil here in Swaziland, together with other natural marula cosmetics. In our business operations, we make the following pledges:
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The Marula Tree can grow to a height of 18 metres. There are 2 million marula trees in Swaziland but only the female trees bear fruit. Nations and tribes throughout Southern Africa have celebrated Marula, the King of African Trees for millennia and have used all parts of the tree for nutrition, medicine, staying beautiful and even for determining the sex of their children.
Inside the nut are two or three kernels, nutritious and delicious to taste but even better to press into oil. The women bring these kernels to a community collection point where staff from Swazi Indigenous Products weigh them and pay cash on the spot – up to E28.50 (about US$4) per kilogram for kernels that achieve the agreed quality standard of freshness.
OUR MISSION is to be a profitable Swazi Natural Products company owned by and generating income for rural Swazi women in line with the highest standards of Fair Trade and Environmental Sustainability.
