Created less than a year ago, the national team is taking its first steps in the world tournaments, while this sport was forbidden for women under the militaro-Islamist dictatorship of Omar Al-Bachir.
Le Monde with AFP
Under the vivaties of a small stadium near Khartoum, Salma Al-Majidi encourages its footballers: created less than a year ago, the National Women’s Team of Sudan chained the defeats, but its very existence itself is a victory. Today, the players meet South Sudan without having really been able to train in a country where, every week, new protesters are killed in the repression of the movement that has denounced the Putsch of General Abdel Fattah Al-Bourhane since October.
Not enough to start the determination of M me Majidi, 30, who has already broken several taboos in this country released in 2019 of a military-Islamist dictatorship prohibiting, among others, women to play football. To work around this prohibition, she joined the land on the bench and became the first woman to train men in the Arab world, where football is the king sport and where women are often put aside, in politics as on the lawn.
If Salma Al-Majidi has collected victories with the men’s teams, she recognizes it, “Girls still make their first steps in international tournaments”. The proof ? Faced with the neighbors of South Sudan, his players lost 6 to 0. and before that, they lost against Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and Lebanon. “Even if they have a lot less experience than others, they improve,” she said, however, at AFP.
And most importantly, in one of the poorest countries in the world, its players should not only deal with decrepit equipment, but also with the disorders that disrupt the calendar of training and even official matches. Thus, on October 26, 2021, they had to welcome the Algerians for a return match from the African Cup of Nations (CAN) and try to take their revenge after a painful 14 to 0. But the putsch, twenty-four hours earlier Forced the Fennecs team to leave Sudan in precipitation, before the repression snaps off and, since, from nearly a hundred dead and hundreds of wounded.
” People hunted out land “
But little import the cancellations and defeats, sweeps the captain of the team, Fatma Jadal, who has long played in secret under the dictatorship. At the time, she tells the AFP, “we had to look for isolated places” because “people were against” the idea that women play football. And “when they saw us play, they hunted us out”. The law provided for a public place for women accused of drinking alcohol or ended “indecent”.
Exasperated to be treated in “second zone citizens”, women were at the forefront of the 2019 “Revolution” which forced the army to rescue the autocrat from its ranks, Omar Al-Bachir . A few months later, while civilians took in hand the transition, they forced their military partners to remove several discriminatory laws for women and even created the country’s first female football tournament.
But today the military landed the civilians of the government and, for women, the freedoms earned high struggle could disappear, worries me me Jadal. “Only military power will bring us back to the time of the restrictions of Bachir, so we really do not want it,” she throws.
A pessimism that does not share M me Majidi, because for her the “Revolution” has already changed the mentalities. “The Sudanese do not accept female football more than before,” she says. And to convince them a little more, the coach already has a new goal in mind: the Female Championship of CECAFA, one of the oldest in Africa, scheduled for March. “Even without going in the final, we must at least stay in the race for a few towers,” she says.