How Cricket Helps Ease Rwanda's Pain

Charles Reynolds in Kigali discovers how ethnic and gender divides are being tackled at Rwanda’s spectacular new cricket ground

- Charles Reynolds

Rwanda – the land of 1,000 hills, gorillas and, now, cricket. If the last one sounds surprising, perhaps one day it won’t. The country this week celebrated the opening of a brand new national ground – the result of a £1m fundraising and construction project from British charity, the Rwanda Cricket Stadium Foundation (RCSF).

Cricket can lay a claim to being Rwanda’s fastest growing sport. Scarcely existing there before the horrific 1994 genocide, it was brought back to the country by those returning from years in exile in nearby Uganda and Kenya.

Its lack of association with pregenocide Rwanda has been a huge factor in its popularity, going hand in hand with President Paul Kagame’s aim that Rwandans be united as one nation, not divided into Hutus and Tutsis.

Kagame himself attended the opening of the new Gahanga cricket ground, propelling cricket onto the front pages of the Rwandan newspapers – although not for the first time.

That honour belongs to Eric Dusingizimana, Rwanda’s national team captain, who in May 2016 broke the Guinness World Record for the longest ever cricket net, batting for an unbelievable 51 hours straight and turning himself into something of a celebrity overnight – well, strictly, over two nights.

“That was the moment that cricket was really born in this country,” says Alby Shale, RCSF project director. “Everyone wanted to know what this game was and were stopping Eric on the street.”

Shale is the son of former prime minister David Cameron’s constituency chairman, Christopher Shale, whose vision of building a new cricket ground for Rwanda inspired the founding of the RCSF when he died unexpectedly in 2011.