Myth Breaking Consequences in Girls and Women Sport and Physical Activities in Africa

Myth Breaking: The Consequences in Girls' and Women's

Sport and Physical Activity in Africa

Rabiatou Njoya, Cameroon

If the practice of sport can facilitate growing slim, the sport is not a good thing for traditional African girls and women because, in Africa, thinness for women means suffering and poverty of either the parents or the husband. This has not been the case for the past decade.

To this phenomenon must be added the confinement imposed on Muslim women by some Islamic sects whose practices are based on rules forbidding certain activities for women. Some of these rules used to be exploited by individuals within African Muslim communities to exclude girls and women from participating in sport.

African people used to fear that women can lose their womenhood by developing muscles and therefore become barren and/or less lady-like. In the same line of thought people also feared that women would not be able to get husbands. Now the growing rate of sport for girls and women in Northern Africa is showing that things are changing. The introduction of sport for all has proved that physical activities are good for our health and that fatness is no criteria for good health.

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