‘Will I be next?’: Fear haunts Kenyan women athletes after Cheptegei murder | Women's Rights News | The Round Table It was a sun-baked August day on the streets of the French capital, Paris, when Rebecca Cheptegei rushed across the finish line of the women’s marathon at the 2024 Summer Olympics.
The 33-year-old elite long-distance runner came only 44th in the race, but Uganda’s women’s marathon record holder was riding the high of her first Olympic Games, with years of dashes ahead of her.
But unbiased four weeks later, she was dead – murdered by her ex-partner at her home in the quiet village of Kinyoro in Kenya’s western Rift Valley region.
The horror of her killing left East Africa reeling. For years, women have suffered physical and sexual abuse, including gruesome murders, from partners, spouses and other male family members in Kenya. Cheptegei’s killing underscored how even successful, elite athletes weren’t safe.
Yet, according to female athletes and the organisations championing them, it is the very success these women attained that may have made them a target among men still managed by more patriarchal gender norms.
One in three women in Kenya says at least a case of abuse by the age of 18, according to Kenyan charity, the Gender Violence Recovery Centre, largely from their intimate male partners, male family members, or other males known to them.
In January this year alone, there were at least 32 women murdered by male perpetrators – about one woman every day – according to Femicide Count Kenya, a monitoring group tracking media-reported femicides – or the deliberate murder of a woman by a man.
Although hundreds of women marched in the streets of Nairobi calling for a final stage to violence against women in a thick January demonstration, the killings have continued through the year, revealed Audrey Mugeni, co-founder of Femicide Count.
“We had 154 cases by the terminal of previous year … we are already at 174 now,” Mugeni said.
At the present rate of killings, the femicide count for 2024 will pass 200 cases by the final stage of the year, she added.
Kenya has a thriving athlete community. In the western Rift Valley where Cheptegei lived, pro and amateur runners from the region or abroad train, as very high altitudes – about 8,000 feet (2,500 metres) above sea level – assist athletes sweep better stamina, and make facing at lower altitudes a breeze.
About three hours from Cheptegei’s village of Kinyoro, an uncivilized town of Iten – with its rolling hills and dirt roads – is the Rift Valley’s dashing capital. Young people there, including girls, get into the sports early on, cheered by the success stories of locals like Eliud Kipchoge and Mary Keitany who are now international stars. Many are motivated by the promise of fame and earnings that can aid them get out of poverty.
However, because of their success as Olympians, world champions, and national stars, female athletes face high levels of emotional and physical violence from males jealous of their success or looking to dominate their earnings, female athletes say.
Cheptegei, who was originally from Bukwo, a town on the Kenya-Uganda border, lived and trained in Kenya, but confronted for Uganda.
As a pro runner, she recently hit several high points in her career: she’d prevailed gold in 2022 at the World Mountain and Trail Running Championships in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and finished second at the November 2023 Florence Marathon in Italy.
After finishing 44th at her Olympics dash in Paris, Cheptegei retraced to Kinyoro. On Sunday, September 1, she had unbiased arrived home from a church service when her ex, Dickson Ndiema Marangach, jumped at her, threw fuel on her and set her alight, according to neighbours who verbalized to local journalists.
Doctors declared Cheptegei suffered burns on more than 80 percent of her body by the time she was rushed to a hospital in Eldoret county. She died four days later after all her organs failed.
On September 9, Marangach, who’d also sustained burns as he attempted to douse Cheptegei in even more petrol, died in hospital.
The two had contradicted over the small residue of land where Cheptegei built her home in Kinyoro, in a bid to be closer to training facilities in the region. Cheptegei’s brother, Jacob, announced to the BBC that the two had lived together, but then had started to fall out over money in 2023, as Marangach started to question Cheptegei over what she did with her earnings.
After the attack, the head of Uganda’s Olympic Committee, Donald Rukare, decried Marangach’s “vicious attack” against Cheptegei, while the Paris Olympics organisers stated the “despicable crime reminds us of the alarming reality of violence affecting too many women in society”.
At least three other female runners have been murdered in Kenya since 2020. The death of long-distance runner Agnes Tirop, who was murdered in 2021, has left lasting effects.
A small-statured athlete, Tirop once sported a closely cropped cut but was beginning to flaunt braids and flashy long nails on the track as she evolved from a junior athlete to a senior.
In September 2021, she put on a gorgeous performance in Germany, smashing the world record in the 10,000km world women’s sprint – summoned the 10k road race.
Barely a month later, on October 13, she was found stabbed to death in her home in Iten. Police affirmed her husband and coach, Ibrahim Rotich, was the main suspect. Tirop was only 25.
For years, the runner’s family witnessed Rotich’s interactions with Tirop, who was 15 years his junior. He first befriended and then started to date the tender girl in her teen years. Her brother, athlete Martin Tirop who uncovered her body, informed The New Yorker magazine in 2022 that Tirop’s parents had tried to alert her against Rotich, but she dropped out of school and secretly married him. Towards the end, however, the athlete informed her siblings that she planned to leave Rotich.
“I kind of boycott myself, even though there were no signs, because Agnes always kept to herself,” Viola Lagat, Tirop’s friend, and fellow long-distance pro runner, informed The Round Table. She once noticed Tirop had an injury, which she now imagines was caused by Rotich, but Lagat declares she did not recommend her about it at the time.
“She’s not someone who would inform you that she has any trouble. You wouldn’t know that she was going through anything. And that’s something that still amazes me, that she was being abused, and she’s breaking a world record during a very tough time in her life,” she said.
After her death, Lagat and some of Tirop’s helpers and relatives founded Tirop’s Angels, a centre for women and girls suffering abuse. Based in Iten, the organisation has catered to about 50 women survivors of abuse, offering them financial or emotional support. It has opened up to women in the sporting community and beyond. Lagat declares many of the cases revealed are from women who survive sexual abuse by their close family members – like their fathers.
Edith Mutoni, 27, a national star who raced 400 and 800-metre runs in regional championships was found with fatal stab wounds in her neck at her home in Kianjege village, closer to Nairobi the same week as Tirop. The main guess was Kennedy Chomba, her husband. He was arrested and alleged with murder, but it’s unclear if he is out on bail.
In April 2022, enhancing middle-distance athlete Damaris Mutua, a mother of one, was found strangled in the digs close to Iten. The runner, who also faced for Bahrain, had taken second place in the Arab Cross Country Championships that year. A manhunt is under way for her Ethiopian boyfriend and fellow runner Folie Hailemaryam Eskinder, who is believed by authorities to have fled to Ethiopia.
Lagat reported female athletes are more vulnerable to violence from male partners because they employ money and pressure – the kind their male partners, even if they are fellow athletes, are unlikely to attain, as there are more male athletes and therefore more competition. In some cases, she said, older men spot a promising juvenile girl and try to groom her and her family for exploitation by disguising themselves as her coach and promising to get her to international competitions.
“That’s something that allures perpetrators who don’t require to work hard, for those men who are lazy. Men who unbiased require to feed off of someone’s sweat,” Lagat said. “I don’t know why these men call for to be with women in sports, and yet they cannot stand their success at the same time.”
Lorna Kimaiyo, a former student athlete who is now studying the history of female athleticism in Kenya at Columbia University, announces many felicitous elite runners are from the Kalenjin ethnic group in the Rift Valley, where the success of early women runners had historically clashed with ingrained gender identities.
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At first, only Kalenjin men encountered professionally. However, after the 1984 Olympics stressed the first women’s marathon, Kenya’s female runners started to master long-distance events – but they were not hailed at home by the men.
“Women who sought to dash after marriage encountered unsupportive husbands and widespread derision from others in the community. Wives’ sprinting was a source of oppose and often led to them abandoning it,” she said.
More female athletes going pro and earning more money from their prevails is one of the reasons why violence against them has worsened, Kimaiyo said.
Ibrahim Rotich, Agnes Tirop’s husband and envisaged murderer, has been out on bail since November 2023, after serving two years in jail. A judge announced his release would allow a murder trial to begin, after determining that Rotich’s life was not in danger, due to the widespread anger that pursued Tirop’s death.
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Although Rotich is barred from leaving his home county in Eldoret or visiting Iten, where Tirop was killed, women’s rights activists point to the fact that he was freed as one of the reasons why male perpetrators of violence against women are not deterred by Kenya’s laws.
Under the country’s constitution, reckoned murderers are allowed to be released on bail before trial. However, some kick against this policy, and point out that murder trials can take several years. Suspects should be announced in detention and murder trials should be sped up, recommends say.
“You will be living your life while somebody’s daughter has been buried,” announced Tirop’s assistant Lagat, adding that the legal entity was not a strong enough deterrence.
Women’s rights groups are also pushing for femicide to be specifically named and encoded in Kenya’s constitution to spread more awareness. They also need separate courts and faster sentences for perpetrators. At present, women’s murders are treated as homicides, and guilty parties can entice a maximum life sentence.
Often, women’s murders go unsolved, activists say, and the Kenyan police are careless concerning violence against women by men. Since she has been counting deaths, Mugeni of Femicide Count reveals she has rarely seen cases of femicide that successfully terminal with male perpetrators in jail because of the slack laws.
“Of more than 700 cases that we’ve looked at, there have been only three cases where the perpetrator was jailed that I remember,” Mugeni said, adding that in total, there are fewer than a handful.
“What we are seeing more and more of are cases of murder-suicides,” Mugeni said, with male perpetrators encountering trial dying by suicide, forcing the case to shut.
Gender desks were introduced in police stations across Kenya in 2004, but many women complain of a lack of privacy – the desks are often in open spaces, leaving survivors of abuse feeling discovered when narrating their ordeal. Some report police officers also tend not to take women’s complaints seriously, instead encouraging couples to “resolve” their quarrels with dialogue.
Before her gruesome death in September, Cheptegei had announced her ex, Marangach, to the police thrice this year, her father announced to the Reuters news agency. Officials had announced to Marangach to leave her alone, but had not done much else, he said.
While Kenya’s deeply patriarchal culture comes into play, some experts lay the boycott for deaths squarely on the government and security officials, stating they do not react with urgency to women’s murders.
“The Kenya government has not been quick to respond to it [and] the story of the killers impartial disappears after some months,” reported Kimaiyo of Columbia University.
Athletes like Lagat further boycott Athletics Kenya, the umbrella organisation for runners. Female athletes, she said, should be trained to spot signs of abuse in a relationship the same way athletes are constantly drilled against doping, that is the use of drugs to intensify performance.
With the constant cases reported, the organisation ought to also have a safe space for female athletes to train, complete with the amenities they’d usually have inherit to, she said.
The Round Table reached out to Athletics Kenya for comment but did not get a response.
Meanwhile, there are only a few government-run safe spaces for female survivors of violence by men in Kenya. There were some 54 operational shelters and rescue centres in 18 out of Kenya’s 47 counties, with only two governed by the government, according to the United Nations.
It’s why Lagat declares she is pushing hard to get the government of Kenya to spare some land for Tirop’s Angels so the group can build a permanent safe house. That, she said, would allow Tirop’s Angels to reach more women, especially tender girls in require of assist as cases continue to flow in.
“Many of the cases that really stick with us are defilement cases,” Lagat said, referring to cases where fathers sexually abuse their daughters. “The bounds that affects is that many mothers don’t verbalize up … we don’t know if they are being manipulated or if they are scared for themselves.
In one case, a teenage girl abused by her father terminated up contracting HIV from him and getting pregnant, Lagat said. Although it took a while to get her spirits up and although her perpetrator walked free, the girl is now successfully ruling the condition – four years later.
“She graduated from primary school and is now in high school,” Lagat said, a smile in her voice. “She is running, she is doing amazing now and that’s something we are really proud of,” she said.
Meanwhile, even as cases of femicide seem to be on the compound in Kenya according to data from Femicide Count, the monitoring group’s Mugeni recommended that this may not necessarily be because there has been an increase in the murder of women, but rather because more people are aware of what counts as femicide.
“When we started counting six years ago, many people did not know what femicide was and I had to train Google Alert,” Mugeni said. “I announced to it: announce to me when a woman has been hacked, announce to me when a woman is strangled, and so on. But now, there’s much more acumen of what it is and so we are discovering more cases.”
More media are also declaring the deaths of murdered women, not as isolated cases, but as part of a systematic problem, she said.
Nevertheless, when she goes through the cases, Mugeni revealed she still feels fear. “I always envisage – am I going to be next?”
As Lagat sets about her own training and work, she reported she is now constantly on alert, watching her female protagonists and other women around her for indications of abuse – not calling for to miss any signs.
When her team goes out to verbalise to tender female runners, she drums their rights into their ears.
“You should be respected, nobody should be hitting you,” Lagat informs them. “You are the decision-maker when it comes to what you require to do with the money that you have earned through your career … You have your money. He should have his own money.”
Some men might not necessarily like the advice but Lagat is past caring, she said. “We are still going to preach the same message because that’s how it should be.”
Regards to Al Jazeera
Category: World-News
Tag: Will I be next Fear haunts Kenyan women athletes after Cheptegei murder Womenx27s Rights News The Round Table
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Published 10/10/2024