What Children Have to Say: A Love Letter to Eswatini’s Children, and a Gentle Rethink

Umtfwana longakhali ufela embelekweni.

A child who does not cry will die on the baby carrier.

I write this as someone who loves being Swati. Our respect for elders, our closeness as families, our sense that no child grows up alone these are things I am proud of, and things I would not trade. It is because I love this culture that I want to look honestly at one part of it: how we treat a child’s voice.

Growing up in Eswatini, I heard this proverb the way most Swati children do not as a lesson, but as a warning stitched quietly into everyday life. It tells us that a child who stays silent, who does not voice their discomfort, risks being forgotten. On the surface, it sounds like wisdom about attentiveness. But look closer, and it reveals something else: children have always been expected to earn attention through distress. Comfort is not a given. It is a response to crying.

And yet, we do not stop there. The same culture that warns against the silent child also punishes the expressive one. A child who is active, engaging, curious the kind of child who speaks up, asks questions, moves through the world with confidence is quickly labelled uyaphapha, or ucinile. Too forward. Too much. Not quite behaving as a child should.

So, which is it? Cry, and you risk being seen as demanding. Speak with confidence, and you risk being seen as disrespectful in the eyes of many at home in Eswatini. Either way, the child is wrong before they’ve said a word about what they feel.

The child caught in between

What we rarely stop to ask is: what if that “uyaphapha” or “ucinile” child is simply a happy child? A child who is loved, who feels safe enough to be curious, who has been given room to be a person rather than an ornament of good behaviour?

Instead of recognising that, we shame it. And slowly, that shame does what it always does it teaches children to shrink. They learn to move through spaces apologetically, second-guessing their own liveliness, unlearning the confidence that should have been nurtured. We tell them we are correcting behaviour. What we are doing is teaching them to distrust themselves.

This is not a small thing. Confidence lost in childhood does not simply reappear in adulthood because we decide it’s now convenient for them to “speak up.” Identity, once quietly dismantled, has to be rebuilt and not everyone gets the chance to rebuild it.

Who gets to speak for the child?

Underneath all of this sits a deeper problem: children are constantly spoken about, rarely spoken with. Adults decide what a child’s silence means. Adults decide what a child’s energy means. Adults narrate the child’s inner life on their behalf often confidently, often without ever asking the child what they meant, wanted, or felt.

This is the heart of what I want to say: children are developing human beings, not blank pages for adults to write on. They are already forming opinions, already sensing fairness and unfairness, already reading the rooms they grow up in. What they lack is not insight  it is a platform. Somewhere along the way, we decided that childhood innocence means childhood silence, and that a good child is a quiet one.

But a child who cries is not simply “needy.” A child who is energetic is not simply “disrespectful.” These are children communicating and it is our responsibility to listen for what’s underneath, rather than reach for the nearest label.

What Ubuntu could offer, if we let it

In Eswatini, this conversation is never far from Ubuntu the philosophy that “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,” a person is a person through other people. This is one of the most beautiful parts of being Swati: a child does not belong only to their parents. Aunts, grandparents, neighbours, the whole village, all have a hand in raising them, and there is real comfort in growing up so surrounded. But every now and then, that same principle gets stretched to explain or excuse why a child can be corrected, labelled, or shamed by any adult who crosses their path.

I don’t think that is what Ubuntu was meant to be. Ubuntu was never meant to be about surveillance. At its core, it is about belonging the idea that a child grows up held, not watched; supported, not policed. A village that truly practises Ubuntu is not one where every adult feels entitled to correct a child’s spirit. It is one where every adult feels responsible for that child’s wellbeing, dignity, and sense of self.

Used well, Ubuntu could be the answer to the problem this piece is naming. If a child is truly seen as “ours,” then their voice belongs to the community too not just their silence, not just their obedience, but their opinions, their joy, their discomfort. A village raising a child in the spirit of Ubuntu should be a village of many people a child can turn to and be heard by, not many people a child must perform quietness for. That is the Ubuntu worth keeping: care distributed across a community, not judgement distributed across a community.

Toward a different practice

Treating children as developing human beings means something practical: including them in the conversations that shape their lives. Asking them how they feel instead of assuming. Making space for their account of their own experience, even when it is inconvenient, even when it challenges the story adults have already decided to tell.

Our Swati proverbs carry real wisdom Umtfwana longakhali ufela embelekweni reminds us not to neglect a child’s distress. But wisdom is not static, and honouring where we come from does not mean repeating everything unchanged. We can hold onto the caution embedded in these sayings the deep, genuine care behind them while gently letting go of the practices that end up teaching children to be ashamed of who they are. This is not a rejection of Eswatini or of being Swati. It is what love for our children, and for the culture we are raising them in, asks of us.

If we want children to grow into adults who trust their own voice, we must start by believing they already have one and letting them use it.

Bantwana bangumliba loya embili children are the pathway to the future. We would do well to remember that the path we are shaping is one they will have to walk on their own feet, in their own voice.