Femicide alert: Athletics is big business in Kenya, and the question of who is responsible for what is happening to female athletes is a pertinent one. — Agencies
In conjunction with the UN's 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, we take a look at the femicide in Kenya: What’s causing an epidemic of violence against women?
REBECCA Cheptegei loved chickens. She reared them and collected their eggs each morning. Her family would gently joke she loved them too much.
“She was always laughing,” says her mother, Agnes. “You always knew when she was home.”
Cheptegei had a chicken coop wherever she lived. This year, she built a house in the Kenyan village of Kinyoro, funded by her recent success – she won the World Mountain Running Championships in 2022 and finished second in last year’s Florence Marathon.
On the afternoon of Sept 1, while Cheptegei was at church, her estranged partner, Dickson Ndiema Marangach, lowered himself inside the coop, with its solid wooden walls. When she returned home, she went outside to check on her flock.
Marangach burst out of the coop and threw gasoline in her eyes. While she stumbled, he used the gasoline can to soak the rest of her body – and set her on fire.
Her 17-year-old sister, Dorcas, ran out to help, clawing at Cheptegei’s black jacket, her finest churchwear, but fled after being threatened by Marangach’s machete.
“I can’t forget it,” Dorcas said. “I keep dreaming of her calling for help.” Watching from inside were Cheptegei’s daughters from a previous marriage: Joy, 12, and Charity, 9.
As Cheptegei collapsed onto the grass, Marangach walked over and emptied the rest of the gasoline on her. He seriously burned himself in the process.
Cheptegei died four days after being attacked. She was 33.
Marangach died of his own burns Sept 10.
A fear of more killings
The majority of Kenyan runners train in the town of Iten, near Eldoret. It lies above the Great Rift Valley on an escarpment 1 1/2 miles high, the thin air and web of trails producing a regular stream of Olympic medallists. In Kenya, it has been named “the home of champions.” In recent years, it has become known for something else.
Gateway to Iten. The thin air and web of trails in the highland town have produced a regular stream of Olympic medallists. — Agencies
The majority of Kenyan runners train in the town of Iten, which lies above the Great Rift Valley on an escarpment 1 1/2 miles high. —©2024 The New York Times Company
Cheptegei’s family has hung a banner on the living room wall. It reads “Fighting for Victims of Femicide” and lists four names.
Rebecca Cheptegei – though born in and competed for Uganda, she had lived in Kenya since the age of two.
Damaris Muthee Mutua – strangled in Iten in April 2022. Born in Kenya, she represented Bahrain internationally. The police named her boyfriend, Eskinder Folie, as the chief suspect, but he fled across the border to his native Ethiopia and efforts to capture him have been unsuccessful.
Edith Muthoni – a 27-year-old sprinter killed in October 2021. Her husband was charged in connection to her death in 2022 and the case is continuing.
Agnes Tirop – stabbed to death during the same week as Muthoni, a month after breaking the 10,000m world record in Germany. Her husband and coach, Ibrahim Rotich, confessed to beating her in a heated argument and then pleaded not guilty to her murder. The case is also ongoing.
“She was a pure talent,” Janeth Jepkosgei, a former 800m world champion and Olympic silver medallist, said of Tirop. “She could have been an Olympic champion.”
Cheptegei (left) though born in and competed for Uganda, she had lived in Kenya since the age of two. — Agencies.
Although the legal process is at different stages in all four cases, there is an apparent pattern: Each female athlete was killed after a financial dispute involving their partner. Speaking to athletes around Iten, everyone worries that they will not be the last.
“We don’t want to bury more ladies, but the same things keep happening,” Jepkosgei said. “It’s no longer safe for any athlete, actually, especially when they’re starting a relationship. We feel scared as women.”
Jepkosgei alluded to a system of control that is well known throughout Kenyan running.
“There are these guys who go hunting for these girls who are talented, and then they pretend to be coaches,” said Violah Lagat, an athlete whose brother, Bernard, won two world championship gold medals competing for the United States.
“Ninety percent of the time, us athletes come from very vulnerable backgrounds. Our parents don’t have enough money or enough food, they aren’t able to provide sanitary towels for the girls. Those men will initially provide that.”
Athletics in Kenya is a route out of poverty. First-place male and female finishers in this month’s New York City Marathon won US$100,000 (RM444, 243), 15 times a Kenyan’s average salary, but performing well in local races can provide a comfortable lifestyle. About 30 female runners earn more than US$100,000 each year, in a nation where one-third of the population lives below the poverty line. With the majority of athletes from poor, rural backgrounds, they invariably will have never handled such large sums of money.
“In many cases, these men are gradually grooming or manipulating someone to put all their trust in them,” Lagat said. “Then the control takes place – how they’re training, who they’re seeing, what they do with their earnings.”
Tirop’s Angels, which Lagat co-founded with athlete Joan Chelimo, is a charity run by current athletes that provides counselling and safe havens for people who are facing domestic abuse.
According to the charity, three-fourths of the women it supports have contemplated suicide because of their situation.
Threats and violence
To get to Cheptegei’s family home, you take the highway from Eldoret, in Kenya’s far west, toward the gateway town of Kitale. It is near the Ugandan border, over which Cheptegei’s parents fled ethnic violence in the early 1990s. From Kitale, it is a smaller road to the tiny village of Endebess, before a 4.8km climb up a packed dirt trail into the shadows of Mount Elgon.
These roads are good for training, soft on the knees, undulating for the legs and high for the lungs.
Cheptegei was spotted as a talented runner at seven. She opted to represent Uganda after missing out on a Kenya junior camp, and was supported in her training by the country’s army. After a short period in Uganda, she moved back to Kenya for the superior training facilities. There, she met Marangach.
Her close friend, Emmanuel Kimutai, said, “He was a boda-boda man,” a motorcycle taxi driver, “but pretended to be a coach.”
“He started by escorting the runners with his motorcycle, carrying drinks,” Kimutai said, “but when he realised Rebecca wasn’t in a relationship, he took advantage.”
The issues began when Cheptegei decided to buy her own motorcycle to take her children Joy and Charity to school. According to the family, Marangach said he would arrange it and that he paid for it with Cheptegei’s money, but said that he registered the bike in his name. When Cheptegei complained, Marangach threatened her.
“He keep repeating the same warnings to Rebecca,” Agnes said. “He said he’d maim her ears, maim her nose, maim her genitals.”
On one occasion, her brother Jacob, an elite 18-year-old runner, borrowed the motorbike, with his sister’s permission, for a race in Uganda. He said he was chased down by Marangach and three of his friends and had to flee, hiding in a eucalyptus tree to avoid being beaten.
All the while, Cheptegei was winning races and, with it, earning more than US$50,000 each year.
“Dickson would see the money coming into the bank account, and he had a PIN code,” said Cheptegei’s father, Joseph. “He’d spend it how he wanted. Rebecca was uncomfortable with that, and so in April, she went to the bank to change the number.
“After realising Rebecca had done this, Dickson came home in a fury with a machete. Her phone was charging, and he slashed at it with a machete. She ran away from the house in Kinyoro and reported it to the police.”
By the spring, Cheptegei and Marangach had separated, but he continued to insist the plot was in his name, bringing his new partner to the house and refusing to leave. The police detained him, but he was back within a month, this time trying to change the locks.
“She called the police at Kinyoro again, but the officer said he was tired of all the complaints at this homestead, and that he didn’t want to hear any more of their domestic argument,” Joseph said.
Abuse against women
Abuse of women is a problem throughout Kenyan society. According to government research from 2022, about 40% of Kenyan women between ages 15 and 39 have faced physical abuse.
In 2019, a government survey reported that one in six Kenyan women had experienced sexual violence before they turned 18.
“So many girls are sexually violated because they go for a massage before a race and say they have 300 shillings,” Lagat said of what would amount to a few American dollars. “Then they are told, ‘No, it is 500’ – but if you’re preparing for a race and this is your shot, you can avoid the extra 200 if you do something else.”
That “something else” may also include doping. According to the World Anti-Doping Agency, 44% of positive tests for erythropoietin, or EPO, come from Kenya. With the high levels of coach-partner exploitation, desperate to maximise income, there is added incentive to gain any advantage.
“I know two runners where their husbands were the ones helping them get the drugs,” said Chelimo Saina, who runs a domestic abuse support group. “It’s whatever makes them win. And of course, they’re using the athlete’s money to source this.”
Jackson Tuwei, president of Athletics Kenya, an executive committee, acknowledged the possible connection.
“We have started an enhanced anti-doping programme and want to register all our coaches so we know who is a real coach and who isn’t,” he said. “One of the recommendations is to increase the number of female coaches, and that will also help address the gender violence issue.
“A well-trained coach would not do the things we’re hearing about. We want to eliminate those who aren’t.”
Seeking accountability
Athletics is big business in Kenya, and the question of who is responsible for what is happening to female athletes is a pertinent one.
Martin Tirop, Agnes’ brother, said she had reported what she was experiencing to Athletics Kenya in the year before she died, “but nobody helped her.”
Tuwei said that gender-based violence “has continued to happen at a rate we cannot accept. For this to happen, and to particularly happen to a top athlete, it’s very painful, and so we decided that we cannot accept this kind of thing. But we know it’s happened again and again thereafter.”
Athletics Kenya introduced several new policies this year, including a six-person panel – four women and two men – where gender-based violence and other safeguarding issues can be reported.
The new generation
At the Cheptegei home, rain is threatening to block the roads and Jacob has training the next day: Thursday morning intervals, the toughest session of the week.
Rebecca recognised her brother’s talent and passed on tips.
“She’d always tell me I needed to eat after sessions or my body would get weak,” he said. “Ugali, eggs, chicken, of course, even chapati and tea.”
Jacob dipped his head, bashful.
“When it gets hard, I just remember her telling me push on, even when the body says it can’t,” he said.
The suffering is visible. Since the attack, Charity has been too traumatised to return to school, but will try again after the holidays. She whispered that she wants to be an English teacher when she grows up. Rebecca’s daughter Joy is also talented and clearly a fast runner.
The family hopes that Joy will become an athlete. They also hope Kenya will change before she does. — ©2024 The New York Times Company
