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JUMBI, Zanzibar – "People have tried to stop me from playing," said Riziki Abdallah, sitting in her mother's home in the village of Dole in Zanzibar, a semi-autonomous archipelago off the coast of Tanzania. "They say, 'Do not play soccer, soccer is only for men.'"
In Zanzibar, you can watch children playing soccer, and people watching World Cup on TVs in corner restaurants, like anywhere else. But what are you doing? Here soccer, though popular, is limited to boys and men. Through public pressure, lack of sponsorship, and family shaming, women are discouraged from playing.
"I've never been attacked physically," Abdallah, 23, added, shooting a nervous glance at her mother across the room. "
Abdallah is best known in Zanzibar by her nickname, Chadole, which means" shorty from Dole, "the rural village of 1,000 people where she grew up. She is part of a community of six teams that form the women's soccer league club in Zanzibar. Despite societal challenges derived from conservative beliefs about the role of women, the athletes in the Zanzibari women's league persist, rallying together without resources or support because of their love of the game.
Their resistance to criticism has come together in the midst of a movement. On the field they laugh and embrace, and many of the players have forged close friendships. Their hope is that women's soccer will be recognized in the Zanzibar. But most of all, they simply want to be able to play.
"I am committed to playing," Abdallah said. "I am not afraid of anything."
Abdallah's insistence on playing separates her from her community in Dole, and her skill separates her from everyone else on the island. She is a star of the Zanzibari women's national team. On the field she weaves the other players with dominance, thanks to a decade of finely honed footwork.
That footwork was on full display during a late afternoon game between her team, the Jumbi Woman Fighter, and the Green Queens. Jumbi, a rural village about Dole, hosted the match; it was the first game of the league's 2018 season. Some players combed the dicey field, picking up softball-size rocks and tossing them past the sideline. The crowd begins with the family, but soon grew up as the match spread. A group of young men, some in kanzus, leaned against a stack of bricks behind the goal, playfully taunting the players. "Get her!" They shouted in Swahili. "Do not let her get past you!"
Seven of the women on the field play on the Zanzibari national team. Ramadan and the dazzling Eid al-Fitr celebrations that follow it had just ended, so many of the women still bore the signs of Eid festivities, including stained orange nails, wrists wrapped in delicate henna designs, and freshly braided hair that contrasted with their bright jerseys and neon cleats. The women do not play soccer during Ramadan; fasting (including abstaining from drinking water) makes play in the scorching heat of Zanzibari days almost impossible. And even after the fast is broken in the evening, the tradition holds that only men play Ramadan, if at all.
Abdallah started playing soccer when she was 11, where he showed up in Tanzania, where women's soccer was more widespread, to play in a match. "He said they needed girls, and that was my luck," Abdallah said. "When I come back, I sidelined everything else." She started borrowing cleats from her brother, and she started training in the early morning in Zanzibar coast.
Her timing was fortuitous. about the same time in Zanzibar. In 2007, a documentary about the difficulty Zanzibari women faced in starting that team was making the rounds in international film festivals. It emboldened Nassra Juma Mohammed, to train Zanzibari player on the Tanzanian national team (and one of this year's World Cup commentators in Zanzibar), to commit to starting a league. She named the first team Women Fighters (which inspired the Jumbi Woman Fighter team name), because, she recalls, "We were always fighting to share the pitches with the men." Mohammed is now considered the godmother of women's soccer Zanzibar, which has grown to include six teams in a women's club league, as she envisioned.
Rukia Talib Yahya, 19 and of the Green Queens, recalls being able to say that she would not play, until finally came to the world. "There is still the perception that soccer is a bad practice, that it's bad behavior," she said in her home in Kiembe Samaki neighborhood outside of Zanzibar's capital. "I'm not sure my mom is 100 percent happy."
The island's Muslim heritage and the conservative positions of many of the women's families, while perhaps not causal, may be correlated. While not all Muslim women play with women playing soccer, the experience of women in Zanzibar has been marked by constant criticism. In Zanzibar, 99 percent of the population is Muslim, while in mainland Tanzania is predominantly Christian. The women here usually keep their headscarves when they play soccer in the streets, but during the league games, they take them off just before the whistle blows for play to begin.
"Soccer is a man's sport," Hassan Tawakal, Zanzibar Sports Council commissioner, said matter-of-factly, from his office in downtown Stone Town. He oversees both men and women's leagues in Zanzibar, but he said "tradition" inhibits his office. "It's hard to have soccer for women because some teams are not good for women," he said. "Most coaches have said that they do not have good discipline."
But perhaps nothing conveys the stigma that still exists in Zanzibar against women's soccer. of their physical education in schools.
Soccer is offered in all schools in Zanzibar, just not for girls. Girls are instead ushered to netball, a kind of basketball game with no dribbling and a designated shooter. Many women who play with the boys on the street. for many of them, the league is their first chance to play with other women.
Jumbi's head coach, Khalid Khamis Suleiman, 34, said, "I would be happy if the government introduced soccer in schools for girls," adding, "and if Chadole had grown up playing soccer in school, she would absolutely One of the best female soccer players anywhere. "
Balozi Ali Abeid A. Karume, the son of Zanzibar 's President and the New Minister of Information, Culture, Tourism and Sports , seemed surprised at the thought. "Women in Zanzibar like to be very feminine," he said, "so do you tell them to participate in sports they will say, 'No, I do not want to be like a man.'"
He mentions his favorite all-male English first league teams, saying he is a big soccer fan, and, eventually, he seems to come around to the idea of allowing girls to play soccer in schools. "I think I would be interested in promoting that," he said at the end of the interview. "It's a good idea. I think it is something to look into, since it is where the world is headed. "
Farida Hamisi Kopnibo, 14, certainly hopes so. She is one of the youngest of Abdallah's teammates, and she is considered by coaches to be a star of the next generation of women's soccer. With parents, Farida grew up in different conditions from Abdallah. But despite her socioeconomic advantages, she also reports having faced difficulty in pursuing her dream of playing soccer. While sitting in the living room with her parents, she admits that some of her mother's friends do not think she should be playing. "They are not happy," she said.
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