The girl with a whistle

On a hot afternoon at Zande Primary School in Ntcheu, the dusty pitch seems to vibrate with anticipation. Hundreds of villagers, children balancing on tiptoes, men leaning on bicycles, mothers with babies cinched tightly to their backs, crowd the touchline. The sun’s heat pours down without mercy, but still they stay, eyes fixed on the teenage girl at the centre of it all.

She raises a whistle to her lips. One short blast slices through the warm, buzzing air. The match begins.

And with it, something else, something bigger is happening in this village in Traditional Authority Ganya. That girl is Mercy Makina, 18, the unlikely referee commanding a game many around Magola Village or indeed Ntcheu at large, never imagined a young woman could officiate. Makina’s love affair with football began long before she stepped onto a pitch.

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As a child, she was the girl hovering around the edges, cheering, clapping and running water bottles to exhausted players. She played netball at school, but it was football that captured her imagination. The turning point came when she reached Standard Eight, at just 12 years old and surrounded herself with other girls who loved the sport too.

Together they cobbled a small girls’ team, an act of defiance in a place where football was seen as strictly for boys. Then one afternoon, she stood transfixed watching a local bonanza. But her attention wasn’t on the strikers or the keepers.

It was on the man with the whistle. “I watched how he controlled the match,” she recalls. “I asked someone how referees do their job.

And that’s when everything changed.” Makina approached the referee afterwards, telling him, shy but steady, that she wanted to do what he did. Soon, she became a regular at football grounds, not to cheer but to study–observing positioning, hand signals, the subtle cues of authority. Her chance arrived faster than she dared hope.

In 2025 Makina was selected for a refereeing course organised by the Ntcheu District Sports Council. She was stunned. But excitement collided with fear the moment she stepped into the room.

“It was full of men,” she says. “I was the only girl. My heart was pounding.

I almost gave up.” But she stayed. And in staying, she started a quiet revolution. Today, she has officiated in three leagues, including a major bonanza organised by Norwegian Church Aid as well as Dan Church Aid and also FDH Bank Cup.

Each match she oversees chips away at the old assumptions that football’s authority belongs only to men. Makina’s rise comes at a time when Ntcheu faces a different kind of crisis, one rooted not in sport, but in addiction. According to district figures, six out of 10 young people are involved in alcohol or substance abuse.

Even more alarming, two to three of every five girls are consuming alcohol. Ntcheu District Sports sports officer Mathelo Sitima said sports has become an unexpected shield.

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