What The Umhlanga Reed Dance Taught Me About Water

By Luyanda Mndzebele,

23

It is summer in Hlane, Eswatini, and my mother sees clouds swelling in the sky. The first thing we both do is run to put our buckets out behind the house. My container is a half-tonne tank. My mother's is the big green family water tank. It is like soldiers preparing for war, each of us running to make sure our containers are ready for rain.

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Rain is one of my rarest memories of home. Hlane is dry and arid, and I usually call it a desert because of this. And yet it was here that I fell in love with gardening. I still remember the day I came home from school with fifteen tomato seedlings, bought with the pocket money I earned for taking part in extracurricular activities. On the bus, I held them like they were my children as if they carried the whole importance of my life. I had no structure, no plan. I just knew I wanted them to grow.

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From nothing, and with a lot of sweat, I went into the forest to cut poles for fencing and worked the soil with a spade to build a garden from scratch. But the challenges didn't end there. Once the garden existed, I had to work out how to water it. First I used water from a nearby dam until it ran out, because we were sharing it with the local cows and goats, and they were not easy competition. They drank far more than their share.

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After that, I walked to a borehole, pumped water into twenty-litre containers, and pulled them over a kilometre home in a wheelbarrow. It was not easy. And that was just for the garden. There were still school uniforms to wash, meals to cook, a whole household that ran on however much water we had managed to store or carry that week.

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In much of Europe, the climate conversation tends to start with a number: a target, a percentage, a degree of warming. In rural Eswatini, it starts with a bucket. Whether there will be rain, how much, and what we do with every drop of it, shapes the rhythm of an entire year planting, washing, drinking, surviving. Climate change doesn't show itself here as a graph. It arrives as a dam that runs dry a little earlier each year, or a rainy season that no longer keeps to the calendar our grandparents could once set their ploughing by.

The reeds that carry the rain

This relationship with water runs through emaSwati culture too, most visibly in Umhlanga, the Reed Dance, one of the Kingdom's biggest annual events. Each year, tens of thousands of unmarried young women travel from across the country to cut reeds from riverbanks and wetlands, carry them to the Queen Mother's royal residence, and present them in an eight-day ceremony of song and dance.

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The reeds themselves only grow where rivers and wetlands are healthy. So Umhlanga is, quietly, an act of environmental accounting: if the reed beds are thin that year, everyone notices. The ceremony is also closely tied to the start of the ploughing season, and its songs and rituals carry hopes for good rains in the year ahead. In other words, one of Eswatini's most important cultural events is, at its root, a celebration of water and a reminder of how much depends on it.

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That's the lens I want to bring to how we teach climate change: not just as loss, but as a relationship people have been paying close attention to for generations, long before "climate change" was a phrase anyone used. My mother watching the clouds swell isn't so different from a chief deciding whether the reed beds can be cut this year. Both are reading the sky and the water table for what they'll need to survive the season.

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Why this matters for how we teach it

Climate education often talks about catastrophe: melting ice, rising seas, disappearing species. Those things are true and matter. But if a lesson on water scarcity never mentions the ingenuity of a teenager building a tomato garden with a wheelbarrow and a borehole, or a ceremony that's protected wetlands for generations, it teaches only half the story. The other half is resilience which includes the daily, unglamorous, often exhausting work of adapting, and the culture that has grown up around doing it well.

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Summary

In Hlane, a dry corner of Eswatini, every drop of rain counts. Young Trustee Luyanda Mndzebele, who is from Eswatini but currently studying in the UK, recalls building a tomato garden from scratch and hauling water by wheelbarrow from a distant borehole. She connects this to Umhlanga, the Reed Dance, a major ceremony whose reeds grow only in healthy wetlands and whose rituals carry hopes for good rains. Her message: climate education should teach resilience and cultural knowledge, not just loss.

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