KIGALI, RWANDA – It is not yet 7 a.m. on a Friday, and players are already on the football field at Nyamirambo Stadium in Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. Sixteen young women, ages 15 to 22, are clad in white jerseys and running drills in advance of Sunday’s game in the national women’s league.
Standing in front of the team, Grace Nyinawumuntu also wears a white jersey. Nyinawumuntu, 29, is the coach of this national club, the Association Sportive de Kigali women’s team. A whistle hangs from her mouth as she tells her team what to do next.
Nyinawumuntu was the first Rwandan woman to become a referee in 2004. Later, she became the first female professional coach in 2008, even helping to found the Association Sportive de Kigali women’s team.
Born in Rwanda’s Kayonza district in the Eastern province, Nyinawumuntu grew up an orphan after her parents died in the 1994 genocide. When she was a child, she liked playing sports with her male cousins. She says her little brother died at a young age, and her sister would not play “boy’s games,” like football.
“When I was still a child, I never played girl’s games,” she says. “I used to play all sort of boy’s games, including football.”
It became her passion.
“Football is my everything,” Nyinawumuntu says. “When I am coaching, this is my greatest leisure in life.”
But the path to her coaching position has been anything but leisurely.
When Nyinawumuntu was growing up, it was taboo for girls to play football. Although it’s become more culturally acceptable for women to participate in the sport, playing and coaching football are still considered inappropriate jobs for women.
Nyinawumuntu says that women who play football earn the reputation of being independent and disobedient. Recently married and without children, she admits that her husband has asked her to give up coaching because he doesn’t think football is an appropriate career for a married woman.
“These days, I am not in a good mood with my husband,” she says. “He says he doesn’t want me to continue in football career.”
But the coach is relentless, avowing her love for football above all things.
“This is my profession,” she says. “I studied it, and it is my job, which pays me, and I am proud of doing it. People have different things to do for fun. For me, it’s football. I can’t stop it for any influence, even my husband or my future children.”
Football has long been a “boy’s game” in Rwanda, as in many regions of the world. Although women’s involvement in football is more culturally accepted now, playing or coaching football is still considered an inappropriate career for women. Undeterred, women have been challenging the stereotype by pursuing their passions through careers as football players, referees and coaches.
Mukagatabaro Verdiana, 77, says it used to be taboo for girls to play football in Rwanda.
“No, no, no,” she says. “In the Rwandan culture, a girl were not allowed to play football because it was not allowed for a girl to approach boys, except her husband. A girl who were doing this, she were taken [as] a nonserious girl.”
Clothing was another reason for the disapproval.
“A girl who [was] playing football, sometimes she were out of culture because she [was] not wearing a trousers to protect her,” she says. “Clothes which were allowed for girls were only skirts and dresses. Then, can you imagine a girl wearing a skirt and playing football? It was a shame!”
When Nyinawumuntu was in primary school, football was not yet seen as an appropriate pastime for girls. Her adoptive parents disapproved of how dirty she got while playing the sport.
“I was beaten because I was very dirty,” she says. “And my family, which lived in the village, did not have enough capacity to buy soap and water to clean my clothes.”
Still, she wouldn’t quit.
“Despite all struggles, this was my favorite game,” she says.
Always athletic, Nyinawumuntu played handball, volleyball and football at Lycee de Kigali, where she attended secondary school. Football was her favorite game, but she had not yet considered the possibility of building a career around it.
She eventually started playing for the team representing Nyamirambo, then a district but now a sector in Nyarugenge district.
“When I finished my secondary school, I went to Nyamirambo Stadium, just for practices,” she says. “It was my first time to play with a team like Nyamirambo district women team.”
She says it wasn’t long before she became one of the best players on the team.
After that, she became a professional, playing for different women’s football teams, including the Nyarugenge district team, Nyamirambo district team and the Kigali city team. In all teams, she was a defender, playing position five.
“Grace was a very passionate and hard-working player,” says Felicite Rwemarika, Nyinawumuntu’s first coach and commissioner of Fédération Rwandaise de Football Association, the Rwanda women’s football federation.
“I worked with her when she was still in primary school,” she says. “She was very strict to the point that when she failed a game, she would cry and get very angry. But I taught her that football is fair play, and she could not feel any hatred against her opponents.”
After secondary school, Nyinawumuntu approached her former coach about studying sports in university. While her coach was supportive, her adoptive parents were not.
“I advised her to choose what was better for herself, because no one else would study for her,” Rwemarika says.
In 2004, Nyinawumuntu enrolled in the newly established sports education program at the Kigali Institute of Education. Her family remained convinced that sports were not an appropriate career for a young woman. She says they wondered how she would find a husband and warned her that her body would become unappealing if she continued to play football.
Undeterred, Nyinawumuntu continued her studies. Later that year, she got her first big break. Fédération Rwandaise de Football Association hired her to be a referee.
She became the first woman to referee at the national level in Rwanda.
And then things began to happen for her. She played in a league in Germany and later attended coaching trainings in Germany and the Netherlands.
“This is where I got additional skills and experience that I use in my football career,” she says.
After attending the coaching trainings, she realized that although other women had since become referees and some women coached for fun, there were still no professional female coaches in Rwanda at the national level.
She applied to the Fédération Rwandaise de Football Association to coach. Just four months later, she began coaching the Association Sportive de Kigali women’s team in 2008. With the aid of the association and city authorities, she had also helped to found the team.
With this, she became the first woman to coach a national football team in Rwanda. She still faces opposition – even from her family – for pursuing football as a career. But she hasn’t let this dissuade her.
With Nyinawumuntu at the helm, the team has won three consecutive national championships in 2009, 2010 and 2011. So far this season, her team is in first place.
“Our coach is a very interesting woman,” says Oscarie Iragena, a striker who plays position nine on Nyinawumuntu’s team. “She is courageous and takes care of us. Apart from being our coach, we consider her as our parent. She advises and encourages us. But she is very strict.”
Iragena says Nyinawumuntu is her role model.
“She does not like joking when we are working and playing,” she says. “But she gives me an example of a very good coach. In fact, I strive to be a coach like her.”
Nyinawumuntu has a coaching idol too: José Mourinho, coach of the Chelsea Football Club in England.
“He has a very good behavior [on the field] like being very attentive and standing while his team is playing,” she says. “He has no fear in front of any team. He is a very confident man.”
Nyinawumuntu says she was pleased when her own players begin referring to her with a nickname that stuck – “Mourinho.”
In the team’s game following its practice, Nyinawumuntu again lived up to both her reputation and her nickname. Association Sportive de Kigali beat the Musanze Football Club 3-1 to remain undefeated.
Christine Kampire of GPI’s Rwanda News Desk contributed to the reporting of this article.
