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Title [ICM's Pick] Interviews with African Female Martial Arts Practitioners
Interviews with African Female Martial Arts Practitioners
Cynthia Dotsey(Ghana) ★ Director of Sports, Sport Ministry, National Sports Authority / Taekwondo
Q1. Could you briefly introduce yourself? My name is Cynthia. I do combat sports. I started martial arts from Taekwondo and now I can practice Taekkyeon, Ssireum and Wrestling. In 2016, I had an opportunity to come to Korea for six months to participate in CPI program operated by World Martial Arts Union (WoMAU). So that’s when I learned Taekkyeon and Ssireum. Since I already have knowledge on wrestling, the African wrestling, the Ssireum was easy because it was also done in sand. The difference is only the belt for Ssireum. For African wrestling, the competitors just hold body but Ssireum, you only hold their belt, so that’s the only difference. When it comes to Taekkyeon, it is also similar to Taekkwondo. So now, I continue to impact kids in my country. I have a club and most especially I teach girls for their self-defense and self-confidence. Now I am teaching Taekwondo in governmental schools. Q2. As an African women martial arts practitioner, what are some challenges that you and your colleagues have faced? You know it's a difficult because even general sports, it's difficult to see a woman doing sports because they think sports is for men. I was bullied when I was young and then I felt the need to defend myself. So I just went to learn martial arts and believe me, when those guys knew I learn Taekwondo, this stopped. So I use my experience to tell the girls,“learn self-defense!” in that way the guys or the boys around you, they will not bully you because they know this girl, she knows martial arts, so you are like protected. So I tell them this is what I went through so I recommend them to come and learn it. Q3. What are some barriers that prevent young girls in your community from learning martial arts? There’s a lot of barriers because for the African child, the poverty is too much. For some of the children, when they come back from school they have to go and help their mom in the market. You need to help your parents so they will not get time to come, but we try to convince their mother this will help them because look at me, it's true that I'm in this position. So maybe we try to convince the parents but little by little and we think they are getting it. It's not easy. But I think we are trying to talk to the parents because if they don't let their children the opportunity to come, we cannot train children. So now, we are trying to change their parents' mind concerning sports and martial arts. Q4. What do you think is the power of martial arts in resolving challenges especially of women and youth in your community? Oh, you know, I'm too passionate when it comes to martial arts. It gives you confidence. It's like when you are walking, it gives you some courage that, I can face anything in front of me. Let me give you an example, if you go to training and you are sparring with boys and when you go outside there, you think, “Oh, I can conquer everything”. That is the mind that could be changed because you think “if I go to training, I'm fighting with the boys, then why can't I face outside“? From gym, they've set your mind that you are strong, you are good, you are better. So that's the cycling of the mind that you've had. So this is how martial arts gives you that confidence. Q5. What would be the role of African women martial arts practitioners to bring positive changes to community? You know, when it comes to Africa, the females are timid because of our culture. Women’s are not allowed to talk and their voices are always shut. Even in the house the boys are allowed to go out and play ball but the girls are always kept in the house. So we tried to give them a voice. That's what we are, the women martial artists in Africa are here now. Because we didn't have that in our time. When I grew up, and learn martial arts, I've seen the impact that has had on me. So I want the new generation to have that impact as early as possible. So I think that's what I'm trying to do, to make them have their own voices and talk about what is worrying them. So I'm keep saying to the young girls, “Don't keep quiet”. Q6. What do you think about the physical education policy and curriculum in your country? In our country, we are more concentrated on academics. If they can change policy, they should give the kids the equal time to have the extracurricular activities and the academics. We should have enough time for the extracurricular activities because most of the educators they think the extracurricular class is not important but I think it's very important. Their mind is on academics but sometimes the extracurricular activities help the kids to open their minds. I have a student who is very timid but when she started doing Taekwondo, her emotion just changed. At the beginning when she came to training, she used to just stand at the corner and she didn’t want to talk. However, now she's really vocal and I see that change. Some kids are not really good at academic subjects, but they are really good in sports which will allow them to do the sport. Maybe, the sports can take them somewhere. Some parents may not have money to really help their kids to get to the investing level. I knew an athlete who is a good runner but he wasn't able to even complete the primary education. However, now he has gotten a scholarship to go to the university. Q7. What did you learn from this workshop and how would you adapt the experience and knowledge to your work? I've learned so much. The African continent, we have a lot of culture, rich culture so everyone is sharing their cultures. One thing I've learned is when you want to impart knowledge to children, first you have to be friendly with them because some of them are coming from a difficult background. You have to be compassionate, friendly to draw them close to you. I think it is important that you gain their trust and they also gain your trust. Vicklyn Fudia Dosunmu (Sierra Leone) ★Founder, Davic Initiatives (NGO for youth empowerment) / Karate
Q1. What made you participate in this workshop? The passion I have for women and girls. I have been privileged to go out of my country few times and I saw some things that make me realize how much my country needs help especially with girls and women. Q2. As an African women martial arts practitioner, what are some challenges that you and your colleagues have faced? I will speak personally from my own view. For Karate, before 20 years ago I was the only female doing karate but now we are encouraging more practitioners. I have faced a lot of challenges growing up as a martial arts practitioner. Because when I went to school, I was called tomboy, I was told that I will never get married. It was not really a stigma for me because I had my dad who practices Karate. Whenever I hear things like that it makes me more powerful instead of watering me down because I felt that they are threaten by me. I spoke to our sport minister who is a female. When I asked her how she got through with sport, she had the same experience. She said she was called names. She had many stigmas but she never stopped. I think martial arts is 90% responsible for who I am today because it built my confidence and in Karate I was taught that we have six sense which really helps us to present well and stand out. Growing up and doing karate I was fierce, not afraid of anything. I love adventure, I love the impossible. Whenever you tell me it’s not possible, I always try to show that it’s possible and I think it is because of martial arts and I really appreciate it. Q3. What are some challenges in your community concerning youth or women and how can martial arts positively affect those challenges? In Sierra Leone, the female population is higher than the male population. However, we have a poor system in terms of the empowerment so youth, teenagers and especially girls are more vulnerable because they don’t know how to defend themselves. They depend on one man or another to make sure they eat, they take care of their personal needs and they are more prone to sexual abuse, violence and girls trafficking and all those things. So, I think if martial arts is well introduced to women in my place, and can be shared with them in the way that they can understand and if they practice it, it will really reduce the rates of what’s happening. It will help their minds to be stronger and it will teach them a lot of self-esteem, confidence and strong mind to let them know that “Ok, I can stand on my own and principle”. I believe if girls are taught martial arts before they turn to 15 it would be a different world. Because their minds will become strong and they will be able to make their own positive decision and they will stand up for what they believe. It helps you to respect, I mean personal respect. For Karate, it teaches you how to respect yourself, respect your leader, respect your environment and it helps you to stand up for what you believe. I believe it will change their perspective and the whole community will benefit from it. Q4. What are some barriers that prevent young girls in your community from learning martial arts? I found that it’s just the setting, the perception. It coming from parents down to the community. I was glad to comeback home because I was away from home for five years. I was hoping to share my experiences with a lot of people in my community. Because they haven’t seen it before. They don’t have anybody looking up to that, for example, “Oh, this person has that and this person has done it so I can do it”. Since they don’t have that platform to change their perception, if someone tell a lady that has not done martial arts before that “If your do martial arts, you will be muscular and not get married”, she will be afraid and move back. However, if you tell me I will become muscular if I do martial arts, I won’t listen to you because I know it’s not true. In Africa, since marriage is important, parents don’t want their children to do martial arts because of their misperception. So it’s perception and orientation. They believe the sport is for male and it’s not for the female. Q5. What did you learn from this workshop and how would you adapt the experience and knowledge to your work? This workshop has been so rich for me. I have learned so much for example, I learned about menstruation for girls which I can include in martial arts classes. The workshop gave me bigger package. Before, I only thought I will teach ladies martial arts and how to defend themselves by doing handwork, however, after the workshop I will teach them about their mindset, how to relate with their peers and other lessons I learned from this workshop. I have been exposed to different types of martial arts through workshop. So my vision has been expanded. Catherine Kibuchi(Kenya) ★ Grassroot Outreach, Sports Wave Africa Foundation / Karate
Q1. Please briefly introduce yourself and share with us what made you participate in this workshop? My name is Katherine Kibuchi from Nairobi, Kenya. The reasons why I participated in this workshop are to know how the training is going to be cascaded down to our different countries, especially to Kenya and Africa and learn how to use Sports for Development, Fit for Life initiatives to be adapted to our teammates as well as to our students back in Africa. Q2. As an African women martial arts practitioner, what are some challenges that you and your colleagues have faced? Right, so back in Africa, martial arts has not always been a well dominated sport. So especially female athletes in martial arts experience lack of gender equality. There's also lack of opportunity in terms of participating in national teams as well as being employed. So there's economic deficiencies as well for women. The biggest challenge for them is sexual violence from fellow athletes as well as some coaches. So as a martial artist, a practitioner as well as a leader in that space, what we're trying to do is to build a lot of empowerment around our younger martial arts athletes. I’m trying to give them basic education, vocational training so that they can be able to stand up for themselves in the society. And we are building self-confidence through martial arts. So for African female practitioners, especially martial artists, I think the most important thing is coaching education and I think it all starts from the top. And once we are able to empower women to become coaches, then we are creating equal opportunities when it comes to leadership and training. So that would be paramount for us to be able to take care of the younger female athletes using a lot of female coaches. And the second one is empowerment in self-confidence and self-belief. We need to be able to instill self confidence in our martial artists. We need to instill self-belief so that they can be able to go out passionately, with the confidence that they're going to complete and win on a fair ground. So that is quite important. The other thing is trying to create equal opportunities and job opportunities for them in sports offices around Africa so that they can be a voice for the younger martial artists as well as upcoming martial artists. I think that is what is top of mind and I think I've also come to appreciate that by interacting with other African martial artists, leaders and women in this workshop I've come to understand that it's something that is very important that we start building our culture from top to bottom. That is by ensuring that we have more female leaders who can then act as mentors for our athletes. So we'll be able to address this issues from top to bottom. Q3. What do you think is the power of martial arts in resolving challenges especially of women and youth in your community? In Kenya, we work with the marginalized communities. There are women in gender based violence prone areas which are basically slums. And what we have seen through Martial arts training is one we are building a community so we are bringing them together and trying to address the issue of gender based violence by equipping them with self-defense which is quite important. And then what we are doing with martial arts it to give them a lot of discipline, behavior and also we're trying to offer them life skills. So life skills mean we are trying to give them mental awareness and mental health. We are trying to instill self-confidence as well as a bit of entrepreneurial skills in them so that they can be able to apply the martial arts education to their small businesses that they start because it's in slums and very vulnerable areas. So those are the kinds of things that Martial Arts is doing. But what we want to take a step further is we want to monetize martial arts for them. So we are trying to give them a professional martial arts training. So that's why we need more coaches and so we want to start grading them. We want to start taking them for competitions especially the teenagers. We want them to be able to earn a living from ashore as a sport and that will help them move from the slums to a better area because now they become professional athletes who have salary who are able to make money and go back and act as mentors in slums not leaving them there, not giving them a long term solution. It takes a lot of efforts, organizations, individual to actually come together and find that challenge. But I think martial arts is able to give them a 360 approach to this particular problem because it is going to help you stay away from or defend yourself from gender based violence because once gender based violence starts, then there's unwanted pregnancy and teenagers and they're not able to leave. But if you're able to protect yourself from that situation, then it gives you room for growth and confidence because now you're able to defend yourself. Q4. What did you learn from this workshop and how would you adapt the experience and knowledge to your work? The workshop has been amazing for real. There's a lot of information that we have learned today through the workshop. One being how we can take care of the girl and the environment around them, Sports for Development is such a powerful tool that ICM has and I hope that it can be cascaded down to different markets as a course on its own. I've really appreciated the Fit for Life initiative as well. We've also learned a lot of SDGs and how we can use them as female leaders to empower our athletes and teammates. It has been amazing. I've also liked just having conversations with other African women on how we can make our sport or our association stronger back in Kenya. So it has been a very informative session. ※ Views in this interview are those of the interviewees. |
