Ugandan athlete and Olympian Rebecca Cheptegei died in September 2024 after being set alight by a man she knew in Eldoret, Kenya. Cheptegei's murder was reported to have been about a conflict over land ownership. Her attacker, Dickson Ndiema, has since died from injuries sustained in the attack.
Cheptegei is not the first woman athlete to be murdered in Kenya. In 2021, Agnes Tirop, an Olympic runner, was stabbed to death in her home in Iten. In 2022, Damaris Mutua was found strangled, also in Iten, and her boyfriend is wanted for her murder.
While all the victims in these murders were competitive athletes, these deaths are part of a larger constellation of murders of women across Kenya. Investigative media house Africa Uncensored estimates that 500 women were killed in Kenya between 2017 and 2024. Femicide Count, a Kenyan organisation, recorded 152 cases of femicide in 2023 based on media reports.
The earliest recorded definition of femicide by feminist scholars Diana Russell and Jill Radford in 1992 refers to it as "the misogynist killing of women by men". In 2001, Russell tightened that definition to the killing of females by males because they are female.
Kenya has a long history of activism at a community and policy level on violence against women and girls, which includes femicide. This includes the work done by the Kenyan chapter of the International Federation of Women Lawyers, which was formally registered in 1993. The Coalition on Violence Against Women was founded in 1995.
These organisations, among others, have raised awareness and achieved shifts in the country's legal framework.
The Sexual Offences Act of 2006 was informed by women's rights work across Kenya. This legacy of feminist organising also informed the setting up of gender desks at police stations to create better conditions for vulnerable survivors to report violence. Women's rights organisations led gender training for the police, judiciary and media to create a more effective chain of support for women survivors.
In January 2024, a coalition of organisations across Kenya organised multi-city marches against femicide. These protests were spurred in part by the gruesome murders of two young women barely a week apart in accommodation designed for short rentals.
Ten demands emerged from the march.
Here, I focus on three because they speak to the root causes of femicide rather than the symptoms. I draw on my work as a professor of feminist studies and over two decades of work as an activist across Africa, including my research into femicide in Kenya and South Africa.
The first of the three demands asks that the government declare femicide a national crisis. This would lead to the extraordinary allocation of financial and human resources, as well as the highest level of government attention to address the root causes and symptoms of femicide.
The second is zero tolerance of violence against women. This would elevate any report of femicide to full legal penalties.
The third is better, regular and accessible data collection. This would allow any agency, including civil society organisations, to better understand the scale, nature and demographic factors associated with cases of femicide beyond relying on media reports.
If these demands were to be met in Kenya, there would be a focus on addressing the root causes underpinning femicide and the narratives that sustain it.
The drivers
My research illustrated patterns in the root causes of femicide. Two in particular provide useful context to the three demands highlighted earlier.
The first is that femicide and violence against women assert heterosexuality as the basis for organising socio-economic and political structures in society - whether this is about labour and pay, intimate life or cultural understandings about leadership and societal order.
Women who are viewed as acting outside acceptable norms - such as exercising economic freedom and freedom over their sexuality - are disciplined through the increased surveillance of their bodies. This includes what women wear, where they can walk and feel safe, and what they can say.
The objectification of women by men - whether the men are in power or not - is central to physical and other forms of violence meted out on women who don't conform to particular societal boundaries.
For my research on femicide in Kenya, I reviewed the debates on Twitter that followed the gruesome unsolved murder in 2018 of Sharon Otieno, who chose to have a consensual relationship with a married man. In these conversations, many argued that death was a justified outcome for women like Otieno.
Victim blaming absolves the murderer of any responsibility. It turns the murder into a socio-cultural question about women's respectability.
The second pattern I observed in my research is the argument about "not all men" being perpetrators. When femicide occurs, many men argue that these are isolated cases carried out by deviant men, while at the same time placing responsibility for addressing femicide in the hands of feminists.
What next
It's all too easy to continue to place the responsibility of resolving what is a societal question in the hands of feminist activists. However, doing so belies the reality of structural power in favour of men, which sustains femicide.
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For femicide to be considered a crime for which there is zero tolerance in Kenya, the government must challenge the underpinning logic of women's murders as justifiable because they don't conform to conservative societal views on gender. This would require that the reporting and prosecution of femicide cases doesn't sanitise murderers as sensible, responsible people who simply acted out of character.
Additionally, the demand to declare femicide a national crisis expands societal responsibility. It moves the responsibility of addressing heinous crimes against women from women's rights and feminist organisations. If it's true that "not all men hate women and want them dead", then it behoves men who distance themselves from these crimes to take responsibility for addressing the toxic masculinity that feeds violence against women.
This includes a national response, led by the head of state and his cabinet, who have been silent thus far. Such a response will require the allocation of necessary resources for swift and effective prosecution and driving awareness work to challenge toxic masculinity that causes femicide.
The change Kenya requires is for everyone to say one case of femicide is one murder too many.
Awino Okech, Professor of Feminist and Security Studies, SOAS, University of London
