Violence Against Women: The Tragedies of Female Champions in Kenya
(Content Warning: This article contains depictions of violence.)
On October 21, 2021, Agnes Tirop, a 26-year-old Kenyan elite runner who set a world record for a 10-kilometer road race, was lying in blood — dead — in her house. And the murderer was her husband.
A few days after Tirop’s death, her husband turned himself in to the police and confessed that his murder was due to a heated argument about money and infidelity. Now, he is awaiting trial.
On April 19, 2022, BBC News reported that Damaris Muthee Mutua, another Kenyan elite runner who won bronze for multiple distance races, was found dead by strangulation in her boyfriend’s house. The boyfriend, a suspect in killing her, had fled to Ethiopia.
Kenya is well-known for its best competitive runners worldwide. Since the late 1980s, when East African nutrition and technology began catching up with the West, about 70 to 80 percent of winners in competitive running have been from Kenya. These elite runners often train in a small town called Iten, located a mile and a half above sea level in Western Kenya.
Despite bringing out the best athletes in the world, Iten is also a place of violence. Tirop and Mutua weren’t the only victims. After countless interviews with Kenyan athletes, coaches and police officers, reporters from Bloomberg investigation have found other cases of “alleged domestic abuse, violence and property theft involving female athletes in Iten.”
The United Nations reported that in Kenya, over 40 percent of women have experienced physical or sexual violence by their partners or husbands. And financial disputes are a leading cause of violence.
One of the female victims, marathoner Lucy Kabuu, disclosed that her former partner from Nairobi “sold several properties the couple had bought and cheated her out of tens of thousands of dollars.” Another athlete, Lucy Njeri, was abducted by men hired by her husband due to property ownership issues.
Elite performance also means abundant prize money that flows into Iten, along with generous endorsement contracts from large sporting companies such as Nike and Adidas.
Today, a female Kenyan runner can be successful enough to be signed by well-known shoe brands. If she maintains her excellence, she can earn over half a million dollars annually, which could be a dangerous spotlight in a country where a third of the population is still below the poverty line.
Money has been a malicious motive for men to offer coaching services and even marry female athletes to take over their financial assets and gain complete control of their lives. The perpetual violence is also due to the alteration of traditional customs where women are expected to stay home, clean and cook.
Colm O’Connell, an Irish missionary and athletics coach known as “the godfather of Kenyan running,” shared with Bloomberg that, “women were not looked upon too kindly in the area of sports.” Before it grabbed global attention, Kenyan society did not accept women wearing professional gear that showed bare skin, and thus, women had been running in traditional dresses.
Only when Susan Sirma became the first African woman to win a medal at the World Championships in 1991 did the local communities change their attitudes toward female athletes.
“Nothing changes attitudes better than money,” O’Connell concluded.
Joan Chelimo, a Kenyan and Romanian long-distance runner, co-founded Tirop’s Angels, an advocacy group that works to stop gender-based violence. It had filed over a dozen domestic abuse and property crimes. Countless women in Kenya have turned to Tirop’s Angels for advice and protection. Now, gender-based violence in Kenya has gained international attention.
Chelimo and other board members also frequently visited young girls in training camps and schools in Iten, and have found that most girls are aware of gender-based violence, but most boys aren’t.
Thus, reducing domestic abuse should not solely rely on educating women about how to protect themselves and secure their properties. Reshaping men’s perceptions and attitudes toward women is equally crucial and even a more urgent issue to resolve.
For more detail on Tirop’s case, please review a detailed report newly published by The New Yorker.
