Rwanda
In Rwanda, the scars from a genocide that saw the massacre of close to one million people, are still visible in the most literal sense. Yet they continue to reconcile with each other, as a society, coming together to remember, to never forget. As they strive to remove all divisions, rugby has played a small part in helping people unite.
Twenty-five years ago one of the greatest atrocities the world has ever seen took place. One hundred days of brutal slaughter that ended the lives of 800,000 people, 300,000 of whom were children. Some figures suggest the death toll was closer to the one million mark, and few disagree.
Neighbour fought neighbour, friend killed friend, even vicars and nuns were involved, as nearly 10,000 deaths a day accounted for 10 per cent of the population. It had been an attempt to wipe out an entire people, the Tutsi, one of three tribes in the central African country of Rwanda, and it had almost succeeded, with more than 70 per cent of the country’s Tutsis perishing.
Ever since the Tutsi, who had been the ruling people, were overthrown in 1959 by the majority Hutus, there had been the risk of war, but few could have imagined this. The death of Rwanda’s Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana, when his plane was shot down on 6th April 1994, started the massacre. Hutu extremists, using a radio station and newspapers for propaganda, spreading fear and hate among the people, setting them against one another, began a genocide that attempted to bring an end not only to Tutsi, but also moderate Hutu.
A day after the genocide had begun, the Rwandan Patriotic Front [RPF], a Tutsi-led movement that started after the 1959 revolution, started their own offensive. Led by the now President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame, they launched a military campaign to topple the Government forces. It succeeded on 4th July, 1994, when his forces arrived in Kigali, the city’s capital.
Everything started and ended in Kigali, and today the remains of 250,000 victims are interred at the Kigali Genocide Memorial. During the 100 days of mourning that mark 25 years since the genocide, thousands visited.
Just down the road, the Red Cross Ground, once used to help orphans and street kids, was one of countless venues also being used to remember and, in June this year, it was rugby that brought the people together – for the seventh annual Genocide Memorial Sevens.
‘Never forget’ and ‘never again’, are the two repeated mantras of modern-day Rwanda. It’s not about Hutus, Tutsi or Twa (the third, original, indigenous people), but Rwandans. “I was 13 years old when it happened,” says Kamanda Tharcisse, the president of the Rwanda Rugby Federation that governs the game in Rwanda, including the Genocide Memorial Sevens. “I was in primary school and like everyone I lost members of my family and it was such a tragedy.
“All I can say now, is that Rwanda is growing fast from the genocide, and there are many changes that we are proud of. Society is now working together, there is reconciliation between people, between neighbours. Even with people who did very bad things, there is a reconciliation, and the Government is making people unite, everywhere, at schools, in villages – Rwanda is in a good position now.
“Rugby is part of that,” he continues. “Because it’s the game where you see people unite. You tackle someone on the pitch, and then you sit with them and discuss it after. It’s making people friendly too, they smile when they play. There are many people from different backgrounds playing and nothing can divide them now. When we play, everyone smiles, and that’s making young people want to get involved. The game demands discipline, everyone respects each other, and it’s bringing families together to come and watch too.
“Rugby in Rwanda has come so far and it’s growing fast.”
Today, there’s around 600 senior players in Rwanda, spread across eight teams in the National League, and three more sides in a development league. But the biggest number is in the schools. “We’ve got about 18,000 children experiencing rugby across the country in primary and secondary schools,” explains Kamanda. “The country is made up of 30 districts and we now have sixteen of them playing. We’ve got rugby development officers in ten of them working with schools and in youth centres, and volunteers working with the remaining six.”
Only games played in the capital of Kigali use proper rugby posts, with rural sides relying on makeshift tree trunk posts. “Rugby posts are very expensive,” admits Kamanda, “especially for a school or university, so they make them out of trees.”
Posts aside, the grassroots of Rwandan rugby is burgeoning, something that’s being matched at the top-end of the game. “We are getting to a good standard,” says Kamanda. “We are ranked fifteen in Africa and we’ve been selected to play our first-ever Rugby World Cup qualifier – we’re playing against the Ivory Coast in November. There’s only sixteen [African] teams eligible and we’re in a group with Kenya, Morocco and Ivory Coast. We also have a world ranking now, we are 96.”
Olympic qualifiers are also on the horizon. “They were supposed to happen in Burundi last year, but it was cancelled because of security problems, but it should be scheduled for next year,” says Kamanda. “We’re good at sevens though. It’s our dream to get to the Olympics.”
He has every right to dream, Kamanda not only set up one of the first rugby clubs – Kigali Sharks – but has been at the heart of rugby ever since the first ball was kicked, passed or dropped in a Rwandan school. His coach that day, when he was aged 20 in 2001, was an Anglo-Welsh teacher called Emma.
An archaic TV on a stand is wheeled into a classroom crowded with Rwandan teenagers in Shyogwe, about an hour or so east of Kigali. What plays out then, via the wonders of VHS, is Munster’s 15-16 semi-final defeat to Stade Français in the 2001 Heineken Cup, a game even the Parisians probably didn’t bother to watch a second time. “It was a really crap game,” admits Emma Rees, then an English teacher on a two-year VSO (Voluntary Services Overseas) assignment in Rwanda. “I’d been there since September and because I’d been living in Wales and playing rugby, the sport had been a big part of my identity and I didn’t want to lose that. Rugby was so important to me that I wanted to share it with these Rwandan kids.”
The initial sharing was taking a few off-the-cuff training sessions with the rugby ball she’d travelled with, and was then taken up a notch with the help of some good old fashioned European winter rugby. “I’d been home for Christmas and videotaped the only game I could and it was a really dour game, no action, just a muddy wet game, but I still brought it back with me.
“I’d rallied up the boys I taught in my English class about coming to watch it and they brought their friends along too and as they watched it, they just couldn’t envisage ever playing it, they just said, ‘oh, teacher, they’re so strong’.”
Unlike those watching Munster and Stade Français toil in the rain first time around, the video tape proved an inspiration, and Emma’s rugby sessions started to gain in popularity, despite a lack of resources. “We didn’t have cones, so I used pairs of red and white striped socks filled with sand instead,” says Emma. “And then I just emulated what I’d been coached: Auckland grids, passing along a line, learning how to tackle. They got it all quite quickly.”
The numbers were there from the start. “Twenty five turned up for the first session,” she recalls. “I don’t think it was even about the rugby, it was as much about an adult organising something and taking time to do something with them. Teachers work really hard in Rwanda, but there’s not much pastoral care, and this was an opportunity to have some interaction with a foreigner and do something totally different.”
With the genocide only happening seven years previous, the impact on society could be seen in many ways. “I mean there were obvious scars, some of the kids had been injured,” says Emma. “I’d say in a class of 30, perhaps five had obvious injuries. There were also older children who had their education interrupted by the genocide, so you might have a 22-year-old in with 14 year olds.
“They wanted to talk about their experiences though,” continues Emma. “If you set a story as part of the class, some would write about their genocide experiences. They’d also have people come in and talk about their genocide stories. You couldn’t be in Rwanda seven years after and not have to grapple with that. You wanted to know, you couldn’t ask, but it was always at the forefront of everything.
“It was about understanding they are just kids, they are teenagers like any teenagers, but on top of that they have the experience of genocide, which is horrific. A lot of them were orphans, they were disconnected and, while we had a couple of local kids, they were at boarding school too – they’d been sent away, all over the country, and didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter.”
At the time, the education policy in Rwanda meant that while everyone attended primary school, only a few were able to go beyond. “Only smart kids who were selected could go to secondary school,” says Emma. “They got chosen, were told what to study, where to study, and then had to pay school fees, which wasn’t easy for them. School term would start and you’d only have five kids in your class because the others were still trying to borrow the money to pay the fees and then catch a lift to school. You’d never get a full class until about three weeks in and then, half way through term, they’d be sent home for the next set of school fees. The families couldn’t always sustain the £2 a term, and the kids would ask you for help, but there were sixty of them. Even if you had spare money, how would you choose who to help out?”
The situation meant that if they were able to overcome all the obstacles, they were going to make the most of the experience. “It’s not a country with a lot of choices,” says Emma, “and they’ve experienced poverty, seen horrible things, and had poor living conditions, they know it’s a privilege to be learning.”
Through other rugby-loving volunteers, Emma was able to arrange games with two other schools as word began to spread. At the end of her two-year VSO assignment, Emma returned to the UK but continued to stay involved. “When I left, I gave all my coaching resources to Kamanda [Tharcisse] who had been the captain of my team, he was just a natural leader who had all the passion and understood the game really well. He would then work on rugby development after school, doing whatever he could.”
Sending £30 every month to help cover Kamanda’s travelling and living expenses, Emma set about trying to set up a charity to create long-term support for rugby in Rwanda. “I thought it would be really easy to set up a charity,” she admits. “I thought I could tap up my contacts in Wales and they’d see the rugby side, the fact it’s a similar size and hilly like Wales, and it would just happen, but it wasn’t easy.”
Friends of Rwandan Rugby was founded in 2004, and, after an initial recce that year, co-founders Emma and Deena Aiken returned on a long-term basis in 2007. “We had the aim of staying as long as it took to get the charity established,” she says.
The charity’s focus was very much on schools, to build a foundation for the sport. In Kamanda, who had discovered rugby at school and gone on to set up a successful senior club, they already had the perfect case study.
New leads for potential schools to help came from literally anywhere, or nowhere. “One guy, Alex, wandered in from the bush to find us, and said he could start new teams but just needed some balls,” says Emma. “We lived on a dusty road in Kigali, but it was still pretty easy to find a white person in the city – and we were the only ones walking around with rugby kit and rugby balls – so I guess that’s how he found us.”
Like any charity there were teething problems, including the need for transparency being a UK-based charity on one side, and then a distinct lack of it on the other end. “You’d agree the budget for a tournament, and it would cost £50, but the bill would be £100,” recalls Emma. And there’s also the issue of players going missing.
Invited by another charity to attend an under-14 tournament for under-privileged children in the UK, Emma discovered one of their players had parents with connections who had made alternative ‘arrangements’. “It was day three in London, and a car pulled up for one of the players and he drove off – he’s probably still with his sister in London now,” says Emma.
A young coach who travelled with the group also went awol. “He was very reserved, he was a Shyogwe kid, and he ran away too. He only came back a couple of years ago as he’d been living off grid since then.”
These examples aside, the charity made inroads. “We had twenty schools aware of rugby union in the first year,” says Deena, who had previously played rugby for Wasps and Saracens. “There was a lot of bureaucracy in Rwanda and we needed a letter from the minister for education to help us get into the schools. We banged on a lot of doors, with no luck, but once we had that golden letter things got easier. It meant we could rock up anywhere, and say here’s four balls and a set of jerseys, this guy is going to coach every Tuesday and Thursday at 3pm, then we’ll have a tournament in two weeks.
“Sure enough, 3pm there’d be twenty guys ready for us, and the fact we organised jerseys and trophies at the end was unheard of – they’d never seen a trophy, let alone played for one. And we were going to take photographs and promote the people too, which just didn’t happen in these tiny little communities.”
The importance of the jerseys can’t be understated. “I think they were afraid of playing the game, the physicality of it, but a big issue was the uniform. Rwandans only own one or two shirts, so if one gets ripped, it’s a big deal.”
Travelling to remote areas also produced different logistical issues. “It’s called The Land of a Thousand Hills, you’re either walking up one or down one,” says Deena. “You’d walk to the bottom of the valley, find the flattest part, hustle a few cattle off it, and try to set up some kind of markers for a pitch. You’d have every single child in the village there, so hundreds of children could form a rectangular touchline.
“The players would warm up for about an hour before a game, which is pretty intense for a 15-minute sevens game.”
Aside from setting a fine example to sides who struggle to do so much as a single calf stretch before a match, the Rwandans loved the rugby. “It was so immediately apparent,” says Deena. “These students had so much trauma in their lives, nobody was untouched by it, yet they could forget themselves in the afternoon. The fun and joy that came to their faces, and they had a tendency to touch temples with each other, after every game, in an act of friendship. “As soon as they played rugby, you could see them almost leave their world which is normally reserved for contemplation and stoicism and could find ultimate freedom in a liberating afternoon of physicality and contact. It was so beautiful to watch.”
Two hundred children turned up for drummer Glyn Watkins’ first rugby session. Pontypool-born Glyn Watkins may have dabbled with the game in his youth, but, having made a living as a session musician, it wasn’t his usual gig. Cruise ships, theatres, music halls, but Rwandan playgrounds, not so much. Having signed up, together with wife Mary, for a volunteer programme at a school in Rwanda’s western Rusizi province in 2013, his accent had been all the credentials he needed to become a rugby coach. “The principal of the school had invited us around for a beer one night, and said, ‘you’re Welsh, you’re known for your rugby, I want a rugby team’,” says Mary. “They had one rugby ball, which a few lads used to throw about a bit, but Glyn agreed to do one evening a week and from 500 students in the whole college, 200 turned up for the first session.”
After the initial panic when faced with the immediate need to create the world’s most complex passing drills, Glyn soon found his feet, and began attracting even more new players – even from neighbouring Congo. “It’s a very remote part of Rwanda,” explains Mary. “It’s about seven hours on a bus from Kigali through ancient rainforest, and it’s also right on the border of Congo, so you’d get Congolese turning up for training.
“They somehow heard about it and would turn up regularly for sessions. You knew who was Congolese because at 5pm they’d absolutely leg it and disappear into the distance towards the Rusizi River – the border closed at 6pm, so they had to get across otherwise they’d be stuck.”
Two months of coaching later, Mary and Glyn found out about Friends of Rwandan Rugby and travelled through the jungle to collect two more rugby balls. The donation was followed up with rugby development officers, as the charity provided Glyn with support for six weekends of coaching in the build-up to a national schools’ competition.
Finishing fourth, the school’s principal had got his rugby team. For the Watkins, it was the start of a long-term rugby relationship.
Upon returning to the UK, they set about fund-raising, collecting kit and balls any way they could (including a social media campaign that secured 4,000 rugby balls), before – having completed seven trips to and from Rwanda – they eventually took over the reins of the charity from Deena and Emma. “Rwandans are amazing, they’re just so friendly, so gorgeous,” says Mary, who runs the charity from their home in Newport.
“Everyone I know has fallen in love with them, they’re just lovely. The kids enjoy everything that you’re doing with them and they get so excited.
“We spent last week with them, ten volunteers went over to introduce rugby to a new area. We arrived on the Monday, started working with a couple of hundred kids, and by Friday we had tag tournaments with four schools.”
Five years ago, Donatien Ufitimfura was one of those kids. He had never heard of rugby.
Since then, he’s not only learnt to play, he’s played international rugby, set up a club that has quickly become one of the country’s best and also introduced the sport to thousands of children across his home district. “I was always very angry before I started playing rugby, but now I’m always happy because of it. I have grown up as an orphan in poor conditions, I never saw my father, my grandfather was in charge of taking care of me, and a lot of other kids also grew up like this – they are angry too, because they never had the affections of their parents.
“I didn’t really do any sport at all,” continues Donatien, who was part of Glyn’s giant training session in 2014. “I didn’t know what rugby was but I think it was what I was meant to play, right from the start I was addicted to rugby.
“I was taught it at school, and we were the first to learn rugby in the area and it wasn’t played anywhere else in the district, so when I went home to my village in the holidays I was just wanted to play rugby. I didn’t know how I was going to go even one month without playing rugby, so I started my own.”
With just a single ball to kicks thing off, Donatien began with friends and footballers. “I started introducing it to some football players I knew and others who looked interested when we were holding sessions on the home village playground,” he says. “Eventually, we got together a team of 22 and in 2016 we started attending the national league.”
With his village based in the south western corner of Rwanda, beneath the southern tip of Lake Kivu, travel was an issue. “The nearest team is about 150km from here, but others are a lot further, like in the capital which is about 300km away,” explains Donatien.
Sponsorship for transport came from the charity, and after persuading the league to accept another a new side – “it was hard for them to trust a new team that was based so far away,” says Donatien – they played against Muhanga, a short five-hour, 240km-drive north. “It was amazing, they had been playing for three or four years but we beat them 30-3. We were very courageous.
“We weren’t technically any good, because I was coaching them,” laughs Donatien. “But we worked very hard, we were very fit, and we tried our best.
“We then won all of the games until we got to the final, but then we panicked and we lost 45-0.”
Since then they’ve remained one of Rwanda’s best sides, and as we talk to Donatien, his side are top of the National League, with three wins from three, against Kamonyi Puma RFC (57-5), UR Grizzlies (52-5) and Muhanga Thunders RFC (14-11).
Like Kamanda, Donatien – who flew for the first time last year when selected for Rwanda’s Silverbacks [national side] against Zambia – talks of friendships in rugby repeatedly. While that’s also true of every rugby player the world over, in Rwanda, friendships with people irrespective of difference, is perhaps a far greater achievement. “Rugby has had such an impact,” he says. “How I was, and how I am now, the difference is because I play rugby. It has changed my emotions, how I react to things.
“Before I played rugby I was always angry, but now when you find me I am always happy and smiling. The core values of rugby, friendship, co-operation, have had a positive impact on the development of Rwandan society.”
The success of Resilience Rusizi RFC, has also led to the development of a junior side, with more than 30 children being coached after watching the senior men’s games. No mean feat considering he hails from a village of no more than 2,000 people, Donatien hopes it can impact them in the same way it has him. “Rugby has changed a lot of Rwandans,” he says. “After passing through genocide, a lot of kids have bad emotions, but in playing rugby, they get friendship.
“And they’re lifelong friendships too, ones that are above the divisions, above religion and all social differences.
“Nobody thought I could create a team, let alone one that’s so strong,” continues Donatien. “The [Rwandan Rugby] Federation sent me one worn out ball, and maybe even they couldn’t believe it would be useful and I’d just put it in a dustbin, but from that worn out ball, now the team is shining, and that’s something that I can really proud of.”
Story by Alex Mead
Pictures by Amanda Harman
This extract was taken from issue 7 of Rugby.
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