In Cameroon’s Minawao refugee camp, young Nigerians use the game to help rebuild lives put in danger by Boko Haram
“We play football with our friends to ease our minds,” she says. “That’s why they give girls this ball to play with: to forget about what happened to us.”
Twenty players, aged between 15 and 19, train five times a week on a dry, flat area of ground in front of the settlement’s youth centre. The team was formed to ensure girls could play despite a male-dominated environment and its sessions are overseen by Modu, a stern but affectionate 35-year-old who coached a school side in his village before the terrorists forced him to join Minawao’s first influx of arrivals. He leads warm-ups and then, when everybody has loosened, begins a series of passing drills. “If a girl wants to play, she only has to come to me and she’ll be training with us the next day,” he says.
Each of Minawao’s 69,000 inhabitants has lived their own version of a horrifying shared history. Lucy was only nine when her village in Borno state, Kunde, was raided by Boko Haram.
“They arrived and started killing people,” she says. “We hid in a cave at night and it was impossible to sleep. They were holding guns and we were so afraid of them. I lost my uncle and many other people died. We had to run.”
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Most of the girls’ team are still in school, but Lucy is 18 and starting to make a living by sewing headwear. She hopes to become a doctor – “so that if you are ill you come to me and I’ll treat you” – while Fayiza wants to be a news journalist. Isaac emphasises that role models of any kind are vital for Minawao’s young women and believes football has a part to play.
“Watching footballers around the world, people want to be like them,” he says. “It makes them want to play. It’s the same if you watch actors in films. These recreational activities keep us awake, give us good aspirations, because you think of the future and not what happened in the past. Everyone has their own star.”