What Our Cattle Taught Me About a Changing Climate

By Luyanda Mndzebele,

It is eight o'clock in the morning and you are a sixteen-year-old girl in rural Eswatini. His name is Nkunzi, and he stares at you with teary eyes as you shut the gate. There are cattle on the other side of the homestead brought all the way from Ngomane, where my father and I had gone to collect crop residue to feed them through the dry months.

Nkunzi is stuck on the far side of the farm, where there is little left to graze. After a few days, even the grass turns bitter; the same cows have been eating and excreting in the same patch for weeks. Imagine having to eat where you've relieved yourself. Now imagine eating the exact same meal, day after day, with no variety even meat or eggs turn bland if that's all you're given, over and over. That was Nkunzi's life for much of the year. He was a good friend of mine, in his way, and he taught me something about how people and cattle actually communicate in a place like this: through patience, through routine, and through paying very close attention to what the land can and can't give.

Cattle are not just livestock here:

In much of Southern Africa, and certainly in Eswatini, cattle are not simply an agricultural asset. They are currency for lobola (bride wealth), a store of family wealth, a source of milk and meat, and for many boys and girls growing up in rural homesteads a first teacher in responsibility. You learn to read a cow's mood the way other children learn to read a classroom. You learn where the grass is thinning before an adult tells you, because you're the one walking them there every day.

This is exactly why a changing climate hits so close to home. When rains fail or come late, grazing land shrinks first. Families who have kept cattle for generations start having to walk further, or travel to relatives in places like Ngomane, just to find enough crop residue and grazing to keep a herd alive through the dry season. It's not a projection on a chart. It's a bull with tired eyes on the wrong side of a gate, and a teenager who knows exactly why.

What resilience actually looks like

This is where I want to push back gently on how climate change often gets taught. The story of drought in Africa is usually told as pure tragedy: dying cattle, failed harvests, families in crisis. All of that is real, and it deserves to be told honestly. But that isn't the whole story.

The whole story also includes a father driving to another village to source feed before the grass runs out. It includes children who grow up understanding, from cattle herding alone, how scarce resources have to be managed and shared knowledge that many of their peers elsewhere won't learn until much later in life, if at all. It includes communities that have been adapting grazing patterns, moving herds, and sharing water sources with neighbours for generations, long before anyone called it "climate adaptation."

None of this cancels out the hardship. Nkunzi's bitter grass was still bitter. The walk to Ngomane was still long. But resilience and hardship aren't opposites; they exist in the same story, often in the same sentence. If we only teach the hardship, young people in the UK come away thinking of Southern Africa purely as a place things happen to. If we also teach resilience, they come away understanding it as a place where people have real, working knowledge about how to live with a changing climate knowledge the rest of the world might actually need.

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Photo: 183121427 | Africa © Ecophoto | Dreamstime.com

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Summary

Young Trustee Luyanda Mndzebele draws on her teenage years herding cattle in rural Eswatini, where her bull Nkunzi went hungry through the dry months, to show how a changing climate shrinks grazing land and threatens a way of life in which cattle carry deep economic and cultural meaning. She argues that climate change in Africa should be taught as a story of resilience as well as hardship, because communities there hold generations of practical knowledge about adapting to scarcity that the rest of the world could learn from.

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