Rebecca Cheptegei and the epidemic of women athletes killed by men in Kenya

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 races ahead of her.

But just 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 supporting them, it is the very success these women achieved that may have made them a target among men still governed by more patriarchal gender norms.

One in three women in Kenya reports 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 intentional murder of a woman by a man.

Although hundreds of women marched in the streets of Nairobi calling for an end to violence against women in a massive January demonstration, the killings have continued through the year, said Audrey Mugeni, co-founder of Femicide Count.

“We had 154 cases by the end of last 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 end of the year, she added.

People gathered in Nairobi to protest against increasing violence against women in Kenya, in January 2024 [Gerald Andersen/Anadolu Agency]

Elite athletes not spared

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 – help athletes gain better stamina, and make competing at lower altitudes a breeze.

About three hours from Cheptegei’s village of Kinyoro, the rural town of Iten – with its rolling hills and dirt roads – is the Rift Valley’s running capital. Young people there, including girls, get into the sports early on, inspired 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 help 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 control their earnings, female athletes say.

Cheptegei, who was originally from Bukwo, a town on the Kenya-Uganda border, lived and trained in Kenya, but competed for Uganda.

As a pro runner, she recently hit several high points in her career: she’d won 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 race in Paris, Cheptegei returned to Kinyoro. On Sunday, September 1, she had just 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 spoke to local journalists.

Doctors said 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 disputed over the small piece 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, told 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 said the “despicable crime reminds us of the alarming reality of violence affecting too many women in society”.

Rebecca Cheptegei in action during the women’s marathon final in Hungary in 2023 [Dylan Martinez/Reuters]

Tirop’s Angels

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 dazzling performance in Germany, smashing the world record in the 10,000km world women’s race – called the 10k road race.

Barely a month later, on October 13, she was found stabbed to death in her home in Iten. Police confirmed 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 young girl in her teen years. Her brother, athlete Martin Tirop who discovered her body, told The New Yorker magazine in 2022 that Tirop’s parents had tried to warn her against Rotich, but she dropped out of school and secretly married him. Towards the end, however, the athlete told her siblings that she planned to leave Rotich.

“I kind of blame myself, even though there were no signs, because Agnes always kept to herself,” Viola Lagat, Tirop’s friend, and fellow long-distance pro runner, told Al Jazeera. She once noticed Tirop had an injury, which she now suspects was caused by Rotich, but Lagat says she did not press her about it at the time.

“She’s not someone who would tell 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 friends 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 says many of the cases reported are from women who survive sexual abuse by their close family members – like their fathers.

Dina Tirop, mother of murdered Kenyan distance runner Agnes Tirop, poses with Tirop’s portrait and a trophy at her home in Kapyemisa, in 2021 [Casmir Odour/AFP]

Edith Mutoni, 27, a national star who ran 400 and 800-metre races 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 suspect was Kennedy Chomba, her husband. He was arrested and charged with murder, but it’s unclear if he is out on bail.

In April 2022, rising middle-distance athlete Damaris Mutua, a mother of one, was found strangled in an apartment close to Iten. The runner, who also competed 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 said female athletes are more vulnerable to violence from male partners because they wield money and influence – 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 young 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 entices perpetrators who don’t want to work hard, for those men who are lazy. Men who just want to feed off of someone’s sweat,” Lagat said. “I don’t know why these men want 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, says many successful 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.

At first, only Kalenjin men competed professionally. However, after the 1984 Olympics featured the first women’s marathon, Kenya’s female runners started to dominate long-distance events – but they were not hailed at home by the men.

“Women who sought to race after marriage faced unsupportive husbands and widespread derision from others in the community. Wives’ running was a source of conflict and often led to them abandoning it,” she said.

More female athletes going pro and earning more money from their wins is one of the reasons why violence against them has worsened, Kimaiyo said.

Motorcyclists pass under a town sign on the way to the house of Kenyan distance runner Agnes Tirop, who was found dead with stab wounds to her stomach in Iten in 2021 [Casmir Oduor/AFP]

Holding perpetrators to account

Ibrahim Rotich, Agnes Tirop’s husband and suspected murderer, has been out on bail since November 2023, after serving two years in jail. A judge said 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 followed Tirop’s death.

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, suspected 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 held in detention and murder trials should be sped up, advocates say.

“You will be living your life while somebody’s daughter has been buried,” said Tirop’s friend Lagat, adding that the legal system 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 want separate courts and faster sentences for perpetrators. At present, women’s murders are treated as homicides, and guilty parties can attract a maximum life sentence.

Often, women’s murders go unsolved, activists say, and the Kenyan police are lax concerning violence against women by men. Since she has been counting deaths, Mugeni of Femicide Count says she has rarely seen cases of femicide that successfully end with male perpetrators in jail because of the lax 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 facing 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 exposed when narrating their ordeal. Some say 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 reported her ex, Marangach, to the police thrice this year, her father told the Reuters news agency. Officials had told 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 blame for deaths squarely on the government and security officials, saying 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 just disappears after some months,” said Kimaiyo of Columbia University.

Agnes Cheptegei mourns next to the coffin of her daughter and Olympian Rebecca Cheptegei, who died after her former partner doused her in petrol and set her ablaze, in September 2024 [Edwin Waita/Reuters]

Building safe spaces

Athletes like Lagat further blame 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 enhance 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 access to, she said.

Al Jazeera 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 managed by the government, according to the United Nations.

It’s why Lagat says 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 young girls in need of help 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 reason that affects is that many mothers don’t speak 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 ended 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 managing 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 rise in Kenya according to data from Femicide Count, the monitoring group’s Mugeni suggested 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 told it: tell me when a woman has been hacked, tell me when a woman is strangled, and so on. But now, there’s much more awareness of what it is and so we are finding more cases.”

More media are also reporting 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 said she still feels fear. “I always think – am I going to be next?”

As Lagat sets about her own training and work, she said she is now constantly on alert, watching her female friends and other women around her for indications of abuse – not wanting to miss any signs.

When her team goes out to talk to young female runners, she drums their rights into their ears.

“You should be respected, nobody should be hitting you,” Lagat tells them. “You are the decision-maker when it comes to what you want 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.”