Sadness and anger. Uganda is burying Rebecca Cheptegei this Saturday, who was doused in petrol and burned by her partner on 1 September, a few weeks after running the marathon at the Paris Olympics. The death of the 33-year-old athlete, who succumbed four days later to her severe and multiple burns, has provoked an international wave of tributes and indignation.
Her ex-husband devastated
Her attacker and partner, Dickson Ndiema Marangach, 32, was also badly burned and died in hospital on Monday. Human rights activists have denounced this latest femicide in Kenya, where two other athletes, Agnes Tirop and Damaris Mutua, have been killed and their respective partners accused of the murders, since 2021.
On Friday, relatives of Rebecca Cheptegei in Kenya gathered to pay their respects around her coffin in the western Rift Valley town of Eldoret, near where she lived. Then, in the rain, her body was transported across the Kenya-Uganda border late in the afternoon, ahead of a funeral in her family’s village of Bukwo, some 380 kilometres (235 miles) northeast of the capital Kampala.
“We are extremely sad,” Simon Ayeko, her former husband, with whom she had two daughters, told AFP. “As a father, it has been very difficult.” He has not yet had the strength to tell their children the news. “Little by little, we will tell them the truth,” he sighs.
The ceremony to honour the athlete, who was also a sergeant in the Ugandan army, began at 10am local time with a gathering of family members and officials at the local town hall. Rebecca Cheptegei was “a heroine”, said Bessie Modest Ajilong, the local representative of the Ugandan presidency.
Epidemic of femicide in Kenya
Dozens of athletes made the trip to the small village to attend the ceremony and pay tribute to the woman who finished 44th in the Paris marathon on August 11.
Her brutal murder has once again highlighted what human rights activists call an epidemic of femicide in Kenya. According to the UN, the country reported 725 cases in 2022 alone. A report released the following year by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics found that the proportion of women aged 15-49 who had experienced physical violence since the age of 15 was 34%.