Systematically, the referees go through their routine prefight inspection: Gloves. Check. Headgear. Check. Cup. You wonder how Sylvie Akamba is going to manage this.
The answer, she says with an ever-present smile, is “discreetly,” which would be the exact opposite of how she goes about her “personal mission” as the only female ring official at the AIBA World Boxing Championships.
“It is my fight,” she says, the simple eloquence of her words cutting through any translation.
Akamba, a 32-year-old mother of three, is from Cameroon, a republic in central and western Africa in which sexual discrimination is more common than not. Google “Cameroon women” and you get ads for mail-order brides, articles on female genital mutilation and countless other examples of violence and inequity toward women despite constitutional provisions against it.
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For Akamba to have forged a side career as a boxing referee and judge, in addition to her job as a university physical education instructor and her responsibilities as a wife and mother, is unusual. For her to have traveled across the world to ply her trade is nothing short of extraordinary.
“She wanted to be appreciated, and she wanted to show something,” says Abdellah Bessalem, president of the African Boxing Confederation. “We expect women from other countries — the United States, Italy — but from Africa, it’s very surprising.
“It’s totally different for a woman in a family situation. It’s not the same for a man. Unfortunately, this is reality.”
Akamba speaks of her family, her 12-year-old son’s interest in soccer, her 10-year-old daughter’s talent for tennis and her engineer husband, and she sounds like she could be a suburban mom from Oak Brook.
But through a French interpreter, she does not dodge the very stark differences.
Ask her if she has faced obstacles in her job, and she says: “There are always problems between men and women. It is my personal mission to make sure this changes.”
She is speaking about opening up the sport of boxing to more women like her, but then there aren’t many of those. Akamba says she was the first female boxer in Cameroon and later was a national trainer. She is one of only a handful of women officiating men’s boxing at the top amateur level and said she paid her own way to Chicago.
“My profile has raised the consciousness of my country and the continent of Africa,” she says.
She is inspired by Laila Ali but quickly points out: “We’re two different levels. She’s a professional.
“I played soccer, but I just wanted to be the first one to box. My goal was not just to be a boxer but to show women they could do it too. But it is always difficult. It is always others who keep doors open or closed.”
The boxers in the matches she officiates seem to have little problem with her being a woman.
“I have the same respect if she was a man,” says one from Spain.
Akamba is glad to hear this.
“I’m not surprised,” she says. “They have to respect your role, regardless of your [gender]. But it’s always difficult because men are not looking at you on the same level.”
In the ring, she handles herself with authority. Late Thursday she officiated one of the closest bouts of the night, which had U.S. fighter Christopher Downs winning a two-point decision over Ukrainian Ismayl Sillakh, and Akamba was right in the middle when she had to be, making sure a good fight didn’t turn into a brawl.
“I like being in the ring. It gives me pleasure watching the movement of the athletes,” she says, and then giggles because she knows how her next admission is going to come across.
“Some people don’t like to see men hitting each other, but I like it.”
Her own son, Ndongo Akamba Michel, dislikes boxing, she says, “because he thinks it’s a little brutal. But I do not see it as dangerous. I was never hurt. And for women, it promotes courage. They can fight for themselves.”
It is at this moment where she raises her head, looks you in the eye and makes her point. It is one well taken.
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