THE OTHER NATIONAL TEAM · DR CONGO
During the men’s World Cup, FemGol will trace the history of some of the women’s national teams from the countries taking to the pitch. Because a country’s football doesn’t fit in a single team.
In 1974, Zaire arrived at the World Cup in West Germany as the first sub-Saharan African nation to play in the tournament. Mobutu Sese Seko’s regime had planned it as propaganda. When the players arrived, they discovered their bonuses had been taken by government officials. They threatened to refuse to play. They received threats in return. They played. When Mwepu Ilunga broke from the wall and struck the ball before a Brazilian free kick was taken, the world read it as ignorance. Ilunga explained years later that he knew exactly what he was doing and was trying to get sent off — a desperate protest inside a tournament already marked by missing bonuses and threats.
Fifty-two years later, the men are back at the World Cup.
Congolese women’s football has taken a different path. Without a national plan clearing the way, it was clubs, players and local projects that started building it.
Lubumbashi, 28 September 2020
That was the day TP Mazembe announced the creation of their women’s section with a scouting session in Kinshasa. The club — five-time winners of the men’s CAF Champions League — moved the project to their base in Lubumbashi and set a concrete ambition from the outset: to compete in Africa at the same level as the men’s side.
In 2022 they reached the final phase of the CAF Women’s Champions League. They did not get out of the group stage. The gap to the elite was still visible.
In March 2023, Lamia Boumehdi arrived on the bench — a Moroccan coach with experience in her country’s youth national teams. In November 2024, Mazembe won the CAF Women’s Champions League.
The path was not straightforward. In the 2024 group stage they lost 3–1 to AS FAR, the Moroccan club that had won the title in 2022 and were playing at home. In the semi-finals, Nigeria’s Edo Queens took the lead in the second half and Mazembe were still losing in the 89th minute. Then Merveille Kanjinga headed an equaliser. The match ended 3–1 to the Congolese side after extra time. In the final, Marlène Kasaj converted a penalty in the 10th minute. AS FAR did not score again. Mazembe won 1–0.
Four years after that first scouting session: the first club from Central Africa to win the women’s Champions League. Lamia Boumehdi, the first female coach to lift the trophy. Kanjinga, named best player of the final.
In 2025, without Kanjinga in the squad, Mazembe reached the semi-finals again, lost to AS FAR, and finished third after beating Egyptian side FC Masar 3–1. It was not a year of transition — it was confirmation that the project no longer depended on a single player.
From Lubumbashi to Paris
Merveille Kanjinga joined Mazembe in 2021. She scored 23 goals in her first season, finished as the league’s top scorer and went on to win three consecutive league and cup doubles, two regional titles and the African Champions League. In January 2025 she signed for PSG. In 47 appearances she scored 17 goals and provided 14 assists. In the 2025–26 season she was the top assist provider in the French Division 1 Féminine. On 18 June 2026 she extended her contract until 2030.
Her career is not the story of an exception who escaped the Congo. It is proof that a structure built from within can produce players for the best clubs in Europe.
Butembo
In North Kivu, Jocelyne used to watch men play football in the stadium in Butembo and could not understand why she could not do the same. She did. With the support of Mama Kivu, a Belgian NGO, she founded a women’s competition in the region: teams across the territories of Beni, Butembo and Lubero, with names like FC Colombe de la Paix and FC Dames de Fer. Mama Kivu funds the transport of players through territory where moving around is dangerous, and each team has a social project attached — a sewing workshop, a training space.
This is not football as a metaphor for peace. It is football as the only practical reason for certain women to be able to move through certain places.
It is the same logic Mazembe applied in Lubumbashi: don’t wait for the system to make it possible. Do it anyway.
The national team, meanwhile, lost their WAFCON 2026 qualification against South Africa on a Thembi Kgatlana goal in the 90+1st minute of the second leg. No Africa Cup, no direct route to Brazil 2027.
The men are back at the World Cup. The Léopards Dames watch the next Africa Cup from the outside. But in Lubumbashi and in North Kivu, something exists that did not exist before: people building Congolese women’s football without waiting for the path to be cleared first.
It is not yet a system.
But it is already proof that one can be built.
