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‘When One Is Active in Sports, One Does Not Commit Genocide’
With the Rwandan genocide of 1994 claiming over half a million lives, repairing the damage inflicted on Rwandan sport during this period might be expected to be low on the list of government priorities. Particularly since sport had previously been used to perpetuate violence and create hatred among people. Now, however, the new government feels sport could have a healing, therapeutic effect. A project to educate hundreds of volleyball coaches in the country should set an example.
‘The genocide touched all parts of society and sport was no exception’, says Member of Parliament Jean Mbanda in Kigali. ‘The previous government built a stadium in each region, gathered in many footballers from neighbouring lands, but did absolutely nothing for sports at the grassroots. Rwanda only had one football competition in which the country’s biggest teams competed. Nothing was done for youth and village sports. It was all a matter of short-term successes and propaganda’, Mbanda explains. At the beginning of the 1990s, there was no longer even a Rwandan national team. ‘The Hutu led government was not interested in the cultivation of the national feeling, which sports provided’.
Now, with a new government in place, a wind of change is blowing across the country’s playing fields. According to the Minister of Sports, Dr. Jacques Bihozagara, ‘the current Rwandan government believes sport can play an important part in rebuilding the country. Sports can contribute to reconciliation, to the cultivation of a feeling of national unity. Sports unites people’.
As a first step, the Ministry of Sport is creating a new national strucuture to encourage sport. As part of this programme, several hundreds sport instructors, sports leaders, trainers and referees are being educated and prepared to spread the message throughout the country. Sport has been assigned an important role in primary school education and village life. It is hoped that this will help young people traumatised by the events of 1994 once again find enjoyment in their lives and promote friendship amongst children. From primary school and village level, the plan will work upwards, with special attention being paid to traditional sports, sports for the over 35s, and for disabled people - a group whose numbers have been swollen by the genocide.
Training in Kigali. Photo Tim Kos
Among the Rwandan Government’s advisors is professor W. Wolters of the Wilhelmina Hospital for Sick Children in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Wolters believes that sports projects are excellent instruments to foster national reconciliation and help victims work through trauma. Moreover they are relatively inexpensive, always an important consideration where resources are limited. His research into the treatment of trauma in many different countries, including Rwanda, has led him to conclude that ‘sport is an important means of restoring people’s psychological equilibrium.’
Some of the activities intended to help Rwanda on its long path towards rebuilding and reconciliation are already underway. One of these is a volleyball project in Kigali run by former Dutch volleyball trainer Jaap Akkerhuis (62).
Akkerhuis’s love for volleyball first brought him to Kigali in 1997. As a result of his experience there, the Dutch government decided to sponsor a volleyball-training project in Rwanda. The project’s aim is to groom Rwandan youths to become volleyball coaches. In a country with 70 percent of its population between the ages of 15-30, the potential is clearly enormous.
Now Akkerhuis spends his days in the Amahoro stadium in Kigali working with groups of thirty men and women who are on average 25 years old. ‘This is the first step towards developing the game of volleyball in this country’, he says. The students are selected primarily on grounds of their affinity with children. ‘It’s nice if they already know how to play the game, but if not, I can teach them the rules. That’s not the problem. It’s more important that they get used to the disciplines of a team sport.’
At the end of the seven-year project, hundreds of Rwandan volleyball coaches will have been trained. They will then be expected to return to their own regions to impart their knowledge to the children at primary and secondary schools and in villages which as yet have no formal educational institutions. It is hoped that as a result of this ‘missionary work’ several hundred volleyball clubs will be created.
The Dutch government has taken the initiative through its Embassy in Kigali to ensure that the project gets all necessary equipment such as balls, nets, kits and teaching materials. During Akkerhuis’s first visit there was only one ball for the whole group of students. Now, 1,200 balls are available.
Although volleyball is not a well known sport in Rwanda, people are getting used to the game. ‘As I walk the streets of Kigali, children keep asking me questions about the game,’ says Akkerhuis. ‘Training sessions, are drawing big crowds and the would-be coaches who are in touch with their people at the grass-root levels are telling the same story’. The game also has the potential to reach out to children and adults that have been forced to spend long periods without employment in refugee camps.
The Chairman of the Rwanda Volleyball Association and a member of the Rwanda Olympic Committee (ROC), Robert Bayigamba speaks of a ‘long-term vision’. Of course he dreams that a future national team will become volleyball champion of Africa. ‘What we require is assistance to develop these talents at the grass roots’. But, Bayigamba says, ‘for the moment this dream is of minor importance. The social structure of Rwanda has been demolished in recent years. This project can have a therapeutic, healing effect. It is a start, an important start.’
Jaap Akkerhuis is more cautious: ‘reconciliation is not something I can create’ he says. ‘I train coaches so that they can train their own people, they are expected to organise competitions where the people can participate.’ But of course the experienced volleyball coach hopes that with people from different groups playing together on a regular basis, his beloved game will help them reconcile their differences. Hopefully too, the social structures - like schools - that suffered so much during the genocide will be rebuilt in time and children will again be able to get a regular education and have the opportunity to take part in sporting activities as a matter of course.
Christine Mukamurangira, one of Akkerhuis’ pupils, agrees wholeheartedly with her coach. She used to be a teacher but opted to take part in the volleyball project because she hopes it will help her forget ‘the events’ of 1994. She has a simple message: ‘When one is active in sports, one does not commit genocide.’
Most of the quoted material in this article originates in the publication ‘Afrika voetbalt’ by Marc Broere and Roy van der Drift. KIT, Amsterdam/The Hague/Brussels, 1997, and an article in Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, January 11, 1999.
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