When strolling through rural Zimbabwe, don’t be alarmed if you stumble upon a pack of pregnant women jumping up and down. It’s just Aerobics for Mothers, a program that uses exercise as a tool for community development in the southern African country. Every week for the past 10 years, more than 4,000 expecting mothers flock to fields and health centres around Zimbabwe to take part. And it’s all thanks to a handful of pioneering Canadians.
The program is part of development through sport, a concept coined when the Commonwealth Games association of Canada (CGC) partnered up with Zimbabwe’s sport commission.
Canada has consciously taken a grassroots approach in Zimbabwe to avoid the quagmire of development in third-world countries. The white, western world is heavily criticized for imposing a value structure on poorer regions under the auspices of development. “We at the CGC say ‘we’re here to help you identify what your needs are,” says Bruce Kidd, chair of the development through sport committee at the CGC. “Our preferences are that you focus on persons with HIV, women and children, and persons with disabilities. If your first needs are programs for school children dealing with HIV, that’s what we’ll do.”
Bruce Kidd is also the dean of U of T’s Faculty of Physical Education and Health (FPEH), and knows a thing or two about the international athletic community. According to Kidd, Zimbabwe served as a test ground for Canada’s sport development initiatives because of its geographical and political significance.
Zimbabwe’s southern border nestles South Africa’s northeastern corner. From 1948 until 1994, apartheid-enforced separate development for white and non-white people-ruled in South Africa. The struggle to liberate the country from this institutionalized racism raged for decades, and the effects reverberated through Zimbabwe, southern Africa, and around the world.
In the 1960’s, apartheid South Africa was slapped with a sport boycott, denying its athletes access to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Kidd, an Olympic athlete at the time, brought the struggle back to Canadian soil and began pressuring the Canadian government to join the boycott.
“For the longest time, the Commonwealth was a site of eradicating racism and apartheid in sport through the boycott,” says Kidd. “Because the Canadian position was not perfect, it meant lobbying ministers of sport, ministers of external affairs, senior civil servants, prime ministers and others.”
Not until the mid-1980’s did Canada agree to the boycott, openly decrying South Africa’s inhumane laws. Under external affairs minister Joe Clark, the federal government agreed to cut funding to any national sports organization that sent athletes to South Africa. It also refused to issue visas to South African athletes looking to compete in Canada.
Despite the boycott’s success, it left Kidd feeling uneasy. “The impulse in sport is to reach out and involve…and instead we were saying ‘we’re not going to let you play.’ Instead we were excluding.”
When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, apartheid’s death was imminent. The CGC looked to help the troubled region rebuild its splintered communities, and sport became the solution.
“Our comrades in countries like Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Tanzania, and Namibia were saying ‘in fighting apartheid in South Africa, we took more hits than anybody. The South African Defense Force disrupted our economies…in terms of the trade embargos, we took the hits. You’ve really, really got to provide us with support,” explains Kidd.
So they did. First in Zimbabwe, with programs that targeted women, children, the disabled, and the HIV/AIDS afflicted. Programs have since spread to neighbouring Botswana, Lesotho, Zambia, Namibia, and Tanzania.
Because each country creates programs best suited for its needs, Canadian involvement is limited to funding and interns. The interns, culled from Canadian phys. ed. and kinesiology programs, “are the ones in the field, doing the work that we envision for ourselves,” says Sara Nicholls, the CGC’s Africa programs coordinator.
Seodhna Keown, a recent graduate of U of T’s FPEH, is interning in Windhoek, Namibia. Her mandate: use physical activity to promote education, HIV/AIDS awareness, and life skills.
“Sport and play played a big role in breaking down the multitude of barriers that prevent us from talking about sex, STD’s, and AIDS openly,” reported Seodhna after a recent HIV/AIDS awareness workshop held in northern Namibia. “The most popular game of the day was the ‘AIDS IS REAL’ relay.”
One of the most successful programs is Zimbabwe’s YES project. “All youth in Zimbabwe are at risk,” explains the program director Elias Musangeya, which is why YES-Youth Education through Sport-is so effective.
YES, thriving in all corners of the country, is no more than a structured soccer league. But it reaches more than 30,000 Zimbabwean youth each year. “We went in with football [soccer], and told them to form a team,” describes Musangeya of 50 teenage drop-outs, “and after being given time, we were able to motivate them to talk about themselves, how they could deal with these problems. We managed to bring all of them back into the school system.”
In a country that routinely makes headlines for President Robert Mugabe’s autocratic regime, the inroads made by sport development programs often go unnoticed by the outside world. The Zimbabwean government, however, has taken heed.
In 2002, the government allotted $40 million to the programs. This year, they have increased their funding by 500 per cent, granting $273 million to the initiatives. “The government was convinced that what we were doing was beneficial to the people of Zimbabwe,” explains Musangeya.
The boost in funding was sparked, in part, by Canada’s decision to leave Zimbabwe. In August 2001, the turbulent politics of Mugabe’s anti-democratic, oppressive regime forced all Canadian funding and Canadian volunteers to pull out of the country. The Mugabe government, in power since 1980, was suspended from the Commonwealth earlier this year.
For the CGC, the decision to leave the country was not an easy one to make. “It was this baby that had been built, that we couldn’t be involved with anymore,” comments Nicholls. But, in her opinon, “a success is when we don’t need to be there anymore.”
While the programs continue to thrive, Musangeya is critical of Canada’s decision to leave Zimbabwe. “I think they over-reacted…I think they made a big mistake. Why use sport for political ends?”
But sport is much more than physical activity. It is a tool for community-building, education, health, and political change. “I’m not sure that political clout is there yet,” says Kidd, “but it’s something we’re striving towards.” Which is why, for Kidd and the CGC, Zimbabwe proved to be the right choice, despite Mugabe.
The strong support for Zimbabwe’s Aerobics for Mothers and YES prove that Canada and the CGC is committed to domestic sustainability. While there is no indication that Canadian participation will resume any time soon, Musangeya is confident that the programs will keep growing in size and strength. “I don’t think there is anyone who is going to stop them.”
