What happened in the planning and development of secondary education in Swaziland can be seen as representing a common African experience, and exemplifying a general paradox which characterised the aid process. What donors regarded as persistent weaknesses in planning and management in recipient countries was, in varying degrees, a way of protecting an African view of education against donor intervention. The development of secondary education was shaped by an African approach and the variety of societal institutions across African countries, rather than by the acceptance or imposition of international models and the responsible interventionism of donor agencies. The exceptionally well protected nature of the Swazi case stems from a distinctively Swazi paradox. Extreme dependence on South Africa provided a form of security within which the Swazi monarchy was enabled to give full expression to a remarkably homogeneous traditional system, a system which had broken down elsewhere in Africa. The functioning of a powerful traditional monarchy and the persistence of traditional institutions and processes gave Swaziland a rare degree of autonomy in protecting the Swazi model of education against external pressures brought to bear by a substantial array of donor agencies. The Swazi experience provides support for the view that education, far from being a powerful instrument for economic and social change, has only a limited role to play in the development process. The particularity of the Swazi experience, and the reason it was an extremely heightened case of a more general phenomenon, arises out of the features that imposed fundamental restrictions on alterations in existing societal structures. These features were those that form the two sides of the Swazi paradox, the functioning of a powerful traditional monarchy and extreme dependence on South Africa.