In the last pages of her debut book, Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History (2022, New), journalist Jori Lewis breaks the fourth wall to bring readers into the present and share a story from her reporting process. The archives she had mined were rich with stories of a village called Kerbala—an outpost of French control on the westernmost coast of Africa which thrived at a time when France controlled all of what is now Senegal and much of West Africa. Kerbala had been a haven for freed slaves who had escaped bondage further inland in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But more than a century after its heyday, the village had very nearly disappeared into the landscape.

Still, the journalist writes, she wanted to see whatever was left of it for herself, so she took a cab inland from her base in Senegal’s coastal capital of Dakar before riding a horse-drawn cart to a remote village. There, she met an old man who, she was told, might know where the village once stood. The mood was a bit desperate, and the author tempered her optimism: there was no reason to suspect that even the area’s oldest resident would remember the stories of people who “weren’t warriors or princes or learned clerics.” And in fact, after some careful thought, the man said he had no recollection of it. Instead, he said a prayer for the author: that Allah would help her find what she was searching for. Lewis thanked him in two languages, and then, she writes in the last words of the book, “I continued along my way.” It’s a fitting end to a story about a people who, beyond being forgotten, were scarcely remembered in the first place.

Slaves For Peanuts is a story about a crop and the people who grew it at the margins of an empire. The slaves in this case were not in the southeastern United States, but in West Africa—specifically, in the humid, inland pastures which, in the 1840s, were the most abundant source of the world’s most important oilseed. Like many (if not most) imperial forays of the day, the peanut’s importance came down to a coincidence of taste, industry, and geography: Europe needed oil—to cook and grease machines, but especially to manufacture soap with. Olive oil was well suited to the purpose, but olive trees were vulnerable to frost and tended to grow in areas prone to conflict, making the supply unreliable. Palm oil made perfectly good soap and was popular in England, but its yellow hue was unappealing to French consumers. In the 1840s, French industrialists turned to peanut oil—and soon realized it could be used in a variety of ways, from cooking to fueling lamps.

In France, many consumers—already accustomed to white olive oil bars—likely didn’t even notice they were buying something new when soap manufacturers switched to peanut oil. But in Africa, the shift was nothing short of transformational. At the start of the peanut boom, France’s presence in Africa was limited to a few outposts on the westernmost edge of the continent: “more a hodgepodge of settlements than a cohesive colony, with an ever-rotating population of temporary agents for trading companies.” The largest, on an island called Saint Louis at the juncture of the Senegal River and the Atlantic coast, was a gateway through which the region’s wealth passed on its way to Europe. The rest of Africa lay just beyond it: “a whole continent—one where the French were guests, not hosts,” as foreboding as it was vast, and where practices which were illegal in French territory—including slavery—were widespread. While the French occasionally played the role of white interlocutor, the Africans of the interior were content to keep them at arm’s length.

Peanuts changed all of that. After France banned slavery in all its colonies in 1848, French colonialists began to see themselves as being part of a “civilizing”—not just a mercantilist—cause in Africa. But rising demand for peanuts had spurred demand for farm labor—and thus for slaves. As the French followed their commercial interests ever deeper into the African countryside, freeing more and more people from bondage as they went, the contradiction between their dual missions became harder to ignore. “The trading period has begun; it is said that there will be many peanuts this year,” one commander reported to the local governor in the late 1870s, eyeing the inevitable shift towards French control. “There is, however, one small dark cloud. It is the upcoming liberation of the slaves.”

The geopolitical game Lewis describes in Slaves for Peanuts is an old one, and one essential to the formation of the modern world: one side declares itself “modern,” “civilized,” or otherwise “advanced”—not just technologically, but morally as well—all the while depending on an influx of goods at a cost that’s only possible in the “heathen,” “barbaric,” or “underdeveloped” areas outside its control. As Lewis shows, division and denial allowed European soap buyers to stake a position of ethical supremacy without having to pay a great deal for the high standard of living they craved.

Readers will recognize parallel arrangements that make the comforts of our own world possible: think of how cheap agricultural goods like avocados (and workers) pass across the US-Mexican border, or how retailers in the US, Europe, Japan, and other countries source goods from China—where labor and environmental regulations are lacking—all while crowing about the “green” commitments they’ve made at home. For all of France’s proclamations of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, slavery was essential to both the moral and material architecture of French imperialism in Africa. But legitimizing moral hypocrisy has always been essential to making capitalism work.

One thing that has changed is our perception of those travesties. Modern technology makes it possible for rich nations to exploit poorer ones from a distance, allowing a degree of psychological dissonance. But in the 19th century, exploiting Africa’s lands—and the human hands that worked them—still required maintaining a nearby territorial presence. At least a few proponents of France’s “civilizing mission” had to live in close contact with the people who suffered under it, making the hypocrisy of the whole thing all but impossible to deny.

Lewis sifted the details of 19th-century Senegal mostly from yellowed letters, account books, and dispatches from archives in six countries. That alone is an astonishing achievement. What is more remarkable is that she was able to depict not just the early colonizers, but the Africans as well, including a few former slaves who either fled for French domains like Saint Louis—and rose to prominence in the tumultuous atmosphere of the colonies—or started their own communities nearby, like Kerbala.

Nonetheless, most of Slaves for Peanuts is necessarily limited to the stories of people whose lives history managed to record—namely, the missionaries and inland power brokers who dealt and corresponded with the French regularly. At times, the plot can be hard to follow, as their priorities shift and new people cycle in from Europe. The slaves are a constant presence, but they typically exist in the background, recognizable as a collective more than as individuals.

Where the story becomes most vivid, however, is in Lewis’s descriptions of landscapes, which she often renders more clearly than the characters who populated them. One can see how areas separated by the hard lines of colonial decree were brought together by the bonds of human connection. “Saint Louis prospered despite all the odds,” she writes, introducing the emergent destination for the liberated. She goes on: “It went from a sandy island with a small, fortified post to a proper city as traders and dealers imported stone from the Canary Islands to build houses, and people from the kingdoms up the river or across the dunes staked their tents or built houses of mud and reeds. Eventually, the city filled the whole island and had to expand. … Soon, bridges from island to island were built, to link the major points of the archipelago and provide for communication and commerce with the people up the river and across the dunes. Still, going to Saint Louis took fortitude and determination.”

Ultimately, depending on forced labor for such a basic commodity became untenable for a power that considered itself the vanguard of civilization in Africa. By the 1880s, after having indirectly encouraged slavery for decades, France (along with several other European powers of the day) declared an ambitious plan for conquering the rest of the continent and cited slavery’s persistence as a justification for it—marking the start of what the British called the “Scramble for Africa.”

Hundreds of miles from the coast, at the groundbreaking for a new garrison in Bamako, Mali—one of the last stops of a future rail line which would connect West Africa’s interior to its coast and sustain French dominance in the region for generations—one French colonel told the crowd that slavery was “an integral part” of African morality, and one that Europeans alone had the responsibility to end. Having already spent hundreds of millions of francs attempting to abolish the practice, he said, “Republican France can spend a few million to modify, little by little, with wisdom and prudence, the vicious, unproductive, immoral system which is so beloved of all these peoples.”

By then, whatever memory French colonialists retained of having encouraged that “immoral system” had already faded. In time, the memory of the slaves themselves would pass as well.

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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.

Arundhati Roy once memorably wrote that mass protests, which have been nourished by the memory of generations of repression return with “a kind of rage that, once it finds utterance, cannot easily be tamed, rebottled and sent back to where it came from” (2009, p. 169).  Her words ring true for the decolonial uprisings of a new generation. Inspired by South Africa’s Fallist movements of 2015-16 and in the wake of the global Black Lives Matter surge of 2020, (mostly) young and black protesters have turned against the “thingification” – to which Aimé Césaire equated colonization. This generation of anticolonial activists, from Cape Town to Windhoek, London and Berlin, speaks a new language of decoloniality, with which they claim radical humanity in struggle and theory. They have turned to theorists of the radical black intellectual tradition, such as Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, and more recently Amilcar Cabral and Walter Rodney. Not all their revolutionary heroes are Black and male, though.

Rosa Luxemburg as a person, thinker and revolutionary is particularly attractive to the postcolonial ‘things’, who stand up against their objectified status, and who have been stirred by radical anticolonial humanist desires. More than a century after her violent death in January 1919 Rosa speaks to young radicalising activists because of the ways in which she went beyond, and against, the conventional and predictable in her writing and activism as much as she followed new pathways in the intimacy of her personal life.

It is thus quite appropriate that a new edited volume has set out to Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg in decolonial perspective. Jane Anna Gordon and Drucilla Cornell have put together an introduction and nineteen chapters by authors from the Global South and North, who come from different intellectual disciplines and traditions but share the view that the coloniality of power permeates capitalist modernity as a worldwide mode of domination.

Gordon and Cornell’s volume aims to revisit Rosa’s perceptive writings through the lens of creolizing theory to demonstrate how timely the Jewish-Polish-German activist-theorist’s insights are right now. They draw their orientation from a concept of creolizing as processes, which join together groups of people in unpredictable, yet recognizable ways. Creolizing as an approach to social, cultural and political theory originated in the Caribbean, yet has since been appropriated in endeavours to understand the ties between those “who were supposed to be radically unequal and separated through Manichean social orderings” (p.1). Creolized elements of life embrace ideas, yet also attributes of everyday life such as, among others, food or music. Gordon and Cornell argue that creolizing takes two primary forms. They summarise these as ‘historical and reconstructive’ and ‘constructive’ respectively. The first aims “to identify relations of influence and indebtedness that have been hidden and obscured. In its constructive mode, creolizing stages conversations that could not have taken place historically but that would have been and still remain generative” (p.1).

The volume speaks to both approaches. In historical and reconstructive perspective, Rosa’s pioneering practice of internationalism, and her efforts to look in her analysis and practice to global circuits that were already evident in local ways, rested in her understanding of revolutionary solidarity. In her seminal work of political economy, she extended the perspective of continuing primitive accumulation in global perspective, and specifically to Africa and Asia. However, her revisionist theorising of primitive accumulation, mass political action and imperialism always insisted on attention to the specificity of suffering. Her cross-species solidarity with her ‘brothers’ is well known, as she referred to the abused and violated buffaloes that pulled a heavy cart into the yard of the prison where she was incarcerated because of her fierce anti-war stance. In a fascinating chapter of Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, Maria Theresia Starzmann extends this (post)humanist view with a discussion of Rosa’s herbalism and plant collecting while imprisoned, which Starzmann pronounces “first and foremost an act of care toward the natural world [and] also a political tool and an archival practice” (p.170).

Rosa Luxemburg: a letter from her prison cell

Oh, Sonyichka [Sophie Liebknecht] …Recently … [a wagon] arrived with water buffaloes harnessed to it instead of horses. This was the first time I had seen these animals up close. They have a stronger, broader build than our cattle, with flat heads and horns that curve back flatly, the shape of the head being similar to that of our sheep, [and they’re] completely black, with large, soft, black eyes. They come from Romania, the spoils of war. … The soldiers who serve as drivers of these supply wagons tell the story that it was a lot of trouble to catch these wild animals and even more difficult to put them to work as draft animals, because they were accustomed to their freedom. They had to be beaten terribly before they grasped the concept that they had lost the war and that the motto now applying to them was “woe unto the vanquished” … There are said to be as many as a hundred of these animals in Breslau alone, and on top of that these creatures, who lived in the verdant fields of Romania, are given meagre and wretched feed. They are ruthlessly exploited, forced to haul every possible kind of wagonload, and they quickly perish in the process.

And so, a few days ago, a wagon like this arrived at the courtyard [where I take my walks]. The load was piled so high that the buffaloes couldn’t pull the wagon over the threshold at the entrance gate. The soldier accompanying the wagon, a brutal fellow, began flailing at the animals so fiercely with the blunt end of his whip handle that the attendant on duty indignantly took him to task, asking him: Had he no pity for the animals? “No one has pity for us humans,” he answered with an evil smile, and started in again, beating them harder than ever. …

The animals finally started to pull again and got over the hump, but one of them was bleeding … Sonyichka, the hide of a buffalo is proverbial for its toughness and thickness, but this tough skin had been broken. During the unloading, all the animals stood there, quite still, exhausted, and the one that was bleeding kept staring into the empty space in front of him with an expression on his black face and in his soft, black eyes like an abused child. It was precisely the expression of a child that has been punished and doesn’t know why or what for, doesn’t know how to get away from this torment and raw violence. …

I stood before it, and the beast looked at me; tears were running down my face—they were his tears. No one can flinch more painfully on behalf of a beloved brother than I flinched in my helplessness over this mute suffering. How far away, how irretrievably lost were the beautiful, free, tender-green fields of Romania! How differently the sun used to shine, and the wind blow there, how different was the lovely song of the birds that could be heard there, or the melodious call of the herdsman. And here—this strange, ugly city, the gloomy stall, the nauseating, stale hay, mixed with rotten straw, and the strange, frightening humans—the beating, the blood running from the fresh wound. …

Oh, my poor buffalo, my poor, beloved brother! We both stand here so powerless and mute, and are as one in our pain, impotence, and yearning.

Write soon. I embrace you, Sonyichka. Your R.

(Christmas 1917 from Rosa Luxemburg’s prison cell in Breslau to Sophie Liebknecht).

It is such moments of specificity and solidarity, which are at the heart of some of the book’s most fascinating chapters, where authors put Rosa in conversation with thinkers of the Black radical tradition, who she didn’t and couldn’t meet: from W.E.B Du Bois and Walter Rodney, through to Claudia Jones and Lorraine Hansbury.

So why should we be re-reading Rosa Luxemburg from a decolonial, creolized perspective? What does she offer internationalist, anticolonial readers, analysts and activists in the 21st century? In the remainder of this review, I will highlight points made in some of the volume’s particularly perceptive chapters.

Two chapters connect Rosa’s political ‘strategy’ writing on The Mass Strike with 21st century moments of spontaneous mass action, one (by Sami Zemni, Brecht De Smet and Koenraad Bogaert) on the Arab revolution on Tahrir Square in Cairo; the second one (by Josué Ricardo López) on the Central American migrant caravans from 2018 onwards.

The longest section of Gordon and Cornell’s 500 pages book is dedicated to Rosa’s revisionist analysis of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, starting with an insightful contribution by the late historian Jeff Guy on, what he calls, “a rousing and provocative treatment of South Africa [with which] Rosa Luxemburg applied aspects of her theoretical arguments on the necessary structural links between capitalist and non-capitalist systems to the contemporary imperialist world” (p. 269).

Apart from a few exceptions, such as Patrick Bond’s and Ahmed Veriava’s chapters on the resonances of Rosa’s critique of political economy for contemporary South Africa, the volume tends to lean towards close considerations of her radical humanism. Many chapters speak to the enduring significance of Rosa’s thinking for contemporary concerns, including anticolonial nationalism, a decolonial and anti-racist approach to a critique of political economy, and in the final, particularly strong section of the book, articles on reading decolonial-socialist feminism with Rosa. These are the discussions at the heart of some particularly insightful chapters.

Jane Anna Gordon reconsiders Rosa’s thinking of the role of slavery and shows how she went beyond the conventional Marxist parameters in consistently including the connections between imperialism and capitalism. Gordon concludes that “many contemporary theorists of racial capitalism are tied genealogically to Rosa Luxemburg and her indispensable insights and orientation” (p. 143).

Siddhant Isser, Rachel H. Brown and John McMahon take this thread further in their important discussion of ‘race’-making in their chapter on ‘Rosa Luxemburg and the Primitive Accumulation of Whiteness’. They turn to Rosa’s reworking of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation to theorize the relationship between capital accumulation and constructions of ‘race’ and whiteness as a continuous component of capitalism, across its history. Their writing speaks directly to Silvia Federici’s socialist feminist approach to the primitive (ongoing) accumulation of capital as ‘an accumulation of differences and divisions within the working class, whereby hierarchies built upon gender, as well as ‘race’ and age, became constitutive of class rule’ (2004, p. 63).

The development of the concept of primitive accumulation as an accrual of racialised and gendered social relationships is crucial for pushing radical theorizing that generates incisive accounts for feminist anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist practice. The book’s concluding chapters by Paget Henry and LaRose T. Parris on reading – and creolizing – Rosa Luxemburg through the Black Radical Tradition, illustrate this in fascinating close conversation of Rosa and her – imagined – encounters with thinkers and activists Claudia Jones and Lorraine Hansberry.

Rosa Luxemburg dedicated her life to intellectual reflection and political mobilisation because she could not tolerate injustice of any kind. She expressed and lived solidarity with all who suffered under exploitation and oppression – humans, and members of other species. Her yearning for a more human world undoubtedly resonates with today’s thinkers and activists in the movements for radical humanism in the Global South and North. Jane Anna Gordon and Drucilla Cornell must be thanked for bringing together a captivating collection of articles that look at Rosa’s beguiling legacy for our times.

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This article was first published by ROAPE.

Kenya’s general appreciation of the role of sports in national and individual development notwithstanding, the exemplary performance of Kenyan women in athletics and in sports generally, including related social enterprises, has been inadequately recognized. Even when they achieve notable successes, the low representation of women in sports leadership over the years testifies to their exclusion. Their marginalization is mainly based on their gender and geographical regions, rendering their participation in sports nearly incidental, if not inconsequential. Female athletes continue to bear the brunt of gender stereotyping and cultural practices and traditional values that define gender roles still deter women from participating meaningfully in sports.

Alarmingly, despite recent global and government efforts to promote the freedom of women to participate in sports and to protect their sovereign choices and their lives, they are still subjected to discrimination and continue to be targets of gender-based violence.

Running has undoubtedly been an essential feature of Kenya’s history. However, even with the involvement and achievements of female Kenyan athletes in every Olympics since 1968,  studies of Kenyan sports have focused on men; women’s participation in sports has only just started to generate interest in historical accounts within East Africa Athletics. The impediments and successes of East Africa’s sportswomen have only been sporadically noted and the concept of gender is rarely employed.

Susan Sirma, Sally Barsosio, Tegla Loroupe, Pamela Jelimo, Susan Chepkemei, Hellen Obiri and Sabina Chebichi have all brought home track and field medals from international competitions. Chebichi’s name came to the fore in 1973, when at a Brooke Bond-sponsored meet in Kericho she won her first race. Nicknamed the “Petticoat Princess” for running barefoot dressed only in a green petticoat, the 14-year-old from Mlimani Primary School near Kitale was given her first kit after winning that race. Chebichi’s wins that year were record-breaking as she recorded some of the fastest times in Africa for 800 metres and 1,500 meters. Chebichi also won the bronze medal in the 800 meters at the 1974 Commonwealth Games in Christchurch, New Zealand, becoming the first female from Kenya to win a medal at the Commonwealth Games. However, she soon dropped out of athletics following a pregnancy.

Women have recorded many achievements in sports despite inadequate support, and deserve more from all stakeholders and from Kenyans in general.  “There is a need for all to celebrate all Kenyan female athletes including Agnes Tirop to whom we are paying tribute today who has always shone on track events and won many medals at the Olympics and other competitions at the international and continental level,” Kenya’s Supreme Court Judge, Njoki Ndung’u said during the memorial of murdered cross-country champion Agnes Tirop.

Northern Kenya’s sporting fortunes

Since Kenya’s independence in 1963, northern Kenya — and especially the northeastern region,  which comprises Mandera, Wajir, and Garissa counties — has “remained silent, almost forgotten” as far as sports and its development are concerned. There is hardly any sport that can be associated with the region because of the various impediments placed in the path of sports and athletics enthusiasts in the region, particularly girls.  

In July 2020, Athletics Kenya acknowledged through its senior vice president Paul Mutwii the “more than enough struggles” that northeastern Kenya has faced, including in pursuing its dreams in athletics, and in sports in general. Girl athletes were almost impossible to find in the region ten years ago despite the right of women and girls to participate in sports having been affirmed in 1979. Like in other historically marginalized parts of the country, various upcoming athletes and their promoters in northern Kenya advise that youth empowerment must include recognizing that mistakes have been made. This would encourage all stakeholders to embrace current and future challenges and forge stakeholder synergies and possibilities for corrective measures. Such measures would include aligning Kenya’s efforts with the global ground-breaking initiatives of various agencies, including UN Women-run projects such as One Win Leads to Another, to empower women and girls in order to achieve regional and gender inclusivity in sports.

There is hardly any sport that can be associated with the region because of the various impediments placed in the path of sports and athletics enthusiasts in the area, particularly girls.

Tellingly, there is not a single training camp in northeastern Kenya. Athletics enthusiasts can only meet at the Northeastern National Polytechnic grounds in Garissa. Athletics Kenya (AK) North-Eastern region chairman, Abdullahi Salat, notes that raising athletics standards in the region is a major challenge and that poor sporting infrastructure has further distanced many budding athletes from the sport as they only depend on the Polytechnic grounds which do not even have a standard track. Climatic conditions in the region have also inhibited the growth of the sports, as it is very difficult for athletes to train during the day because of the heat. As such, it should be made possible for athletes from northern Kenya to train in other cooler regions.

The possibilities

For the residents of Kapsait in Lelan, West Pokot County, news of the birth on 9 May 1973 of another daughter to a local family just like any other in the area would have been no more than the addition of a new sibling to the 24 children of a polygamous Pokot household.

When that young girl later expressed her interest in sports, her polygamous father told her she was “useless”, only fit to herd goats and mind children. He could not suspect that his “useless” child would one day break world records, that together with fellow retired former world record-holders Haile Gebresellasie of Ethiopia, Paula Radcliffe of Britain, and Kenyan distance running legend Paul Tergat, his daughter would be inducted into the New York Road Running Hall of Fame (NYRR). There is no such a hall in West Pokot County or in Kenya.

That child was Tegla Chepkite Loroupe.

When that young girl later expressed her interest in sports, her polygamous father told her she was “useless”, only fit to herd goats and mind children.

Neither her father nor the people of her village had any idea that she would turn out to be a world A-Lister in long-distance track and road races. And so it came to pass that during the course of her life, that child (who first ran barefoot to school and later, symbolically, in several races early in her career, including one 10,000 meter-race a day after the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, explaining to the international media that she had done so “out of a sense of duty to all the people taking her as a bearer of hope in her home country”) became a truly phenomenal woman in many respects.

Social-cultural struggles

Tegla’s decision to pursue her dream in athletics was met with solid resistance from her father and the male members of her family.  “Those days, they don’t reckon much with women because they see sports as men’s affairs, especially in my community. No one was willing to support me except for my mother and late sister who stood by me through it all. I have always been determined and I believe I have something special in me,” she noted.

Like women the world over, Kenyan women and particularly those in northern Kenya, have had to endure social-cultural struggles for decades, especially against patriarchy. Patriarchy has always undermined the involvement of women in athletics, the sort of patriarchy that discourages them from participating in sports and instead directs them to reproductive roles. It is the type that insists on the gender socialization of roles, a practice that continues to exclude many women from meaningful involvement in sports, especially those that yield monetary and other material rewards.

Gendered ‘unfreedoms’

Women in athletics ought to be viewed as indicative of development, freedom, and choice. Amartya Sen’s theory of freedom as “both the primary end and as the principal means”, and as understood in the context of social choices theory, is instructive. In Iten, a small town in Kenya’s Rift Valley, women’s success in running has seen them return home with Olympic medals and prize money totalling more than US$1 million. Their visibility has inspired other women not just to run, but also to set up businesses. These women have seen that their well-being can be improved by making entrepreneurial choices that are outside the roles traditionally assigned to them.

When asked whether she would like her daughter to become a runner, Kathleen Chepkurui’s answer was representative of many responses in Iten. She highlighted what Pamela Jelimo, the first Olympic gold medal winner in Kenya, has accomplished (Jelimo earned over US$1 million on the athletics circuit during her widely publicised four-month streak of victories in Golden League competitions across three continents) saying, “When I saw Pamela Jelimo, I said ‘I will support my children’. They can all be runners – my daughters. So, I would like my daughters to be runners.”

Female athletes have used their income to develop Iten. As Caroline Jeptoo notes, “Female athletes help Iten to grow more…. Building schools, churches. Piping water to those places. And especially helping the needy people in society to pay fees, food … and some many things”.

Kenyan women, and especially those in the northern part of the country, are far less likely to pursue running as a career than men. Several barriers in both formal and informal spheres militate against women’s participation in sports. First, parents in the region are more likely to take boys rather than girls to school, which limits girls’ chances of accessing choice-giving forums. This in turn limits their access to coaching and mentorship services. Second, an uncooperative partner or husband can be a hindrance and, third, poverty and limited resources often restrict women.

“When you love a man with no interest in the sport, you end up declining. The man will tell you to choose between him and sports. Of course, I will choose him,” confesses a female athlete.

Lydia Stephens-Okech, an Alliance Girls High School alumni who was one of three female athletes to represent Kenya when women were first included in the country’s Olympic team at the 1968 Games in Mexico, corroborates the evidence of the tribulations of female athletes. “Some of the problems we faced still impede our female athletes’ advancement today and better ways must be found to help them.”  Stephens-Okech notes that lack of education, sexist male officials and traditional views on marriage remain major stumbling blocks for Kenyan girls aspiring to become athletes.

Goodwill and leadership

Standing barely five feet tall, demure, humble, and unassuming, Tegla Loroupe emerged to become the first African woman to win the New York City Marathon after being initially rejected by Athletics Kenya (AK) because of her small frame.

An encounter with Tegla Loroupe reveals an ordinary Pokot woman, her “super-achiever” status not immediately apparent, yet she is royalty in the world of athletics. Tegla is a member of Champions for Peace, a group of 54 famous elite athletes committed to serving peace in the world through sport with the support of Peace and Sport, a Monaco-based international organization. Tegla was named United Nations Ambassador of Sport in 2006 and is also an Ambassador for the IAAF (International Association of Athletics Federations) and UNICEF.

“When you love a man with no interest in the sport, you end up declining. The man will tell you to choose between him and sports.”

Tegla was Kenyan Sports Personality of the Year in 2007 and in the same year became Oxfam Ambassador of Sport and Peace in Darfur together with Elias Figueroa, Katrina Webb, George Clooney, Joey Cheek and Don Cheadle. Tegla maintains good friendships with Prince Albert of Monaco and Thomas Bach, the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

If leadership is a position of influence that enables a person to motivate, inspire, and to set the direction for the purpose of achieving certain goals, then Tegla Loroupe, Catherine Ndereba, and Hellen Obiri, amongst other outstanding Kenyan female athletes, fit the bill.

While research reveals the important roles women play as agents of change, Kenya exhibits a markedly low representation of women in sports leadership. It is as if Kenya supports the views of some of the founding fathers of the modern Olympics games, who denied women participation in sports. Baron de Coubertin, for instance, envisioned the modern Olympic Games as a celebration of masculinity, saying, “Women’s proper place was in the stands as appreciative observers and not participants”.

This low representation suggests a society with pre-set gender roles that perpetuate male hegemony in sports leadership. Such low representation can be attributed to several factors that may be historical, social, organizational, and political. They  include the perception of women as frail and inferior, male masculinity and dominance, cultural beliefs and gender stereotypes, feminine modesty, lack of institutional support, gender role expectations, work-family balance, lack of a social network and role models, lack of education and experience and organizational structures that inadvertently promote men over women. Generally, in Kenya, the entrenched and unchanging organizational cultures that favour male leadership are the major impediments to women’s progress into spheres leadership.

It is as if Kenya supports the views of some of the founding fathers of the modern Olympics games, who denied women participation in sports.

If any efforts have been made in Kenya to institute inclusivity in sports, the progress of women into leadership roles has been slow at best. It was, however, refreshing to see Catherine Ndereba lead the Gender, Welfare and Equality Committee in Sports. President Uhuru Kenyatta had directed that the committee dedicate itself to analysing “women inclusion in teams and federations’ management, existing challenges and opportunities for corrective improvement.” Among other things, the committee recommended stringent action against perpetrators of Gender-Based Violence (GVB).

It is hoped that the recently launched Trailblazer Programme of the State Department for Gender will meet its objective of facilitating women pioneers and icons to play a role in mentoring the youth. Rose Said Rutin, a family counselor and Director of Praise Celebrations, a Christian worship movement in Nairobi says, “All stakeholders, including state departments must work together to cast aside the constraints that have hemmed female athletes in … we must deal with a society in which honest merit is held back, a talent passed over and patriarchy arrogantly allowed to usurp the prerogatives of all. Let the cynic ask by what right we condemn it all. We condemn it at the altar of conscience, equity, and democracy”. Rutin adds, “Our women athletes have been carrying the sedan chair for others. They should sit on the sedan chairs themselves.”  For Rutin, athletes like Tegla Loroupe, Catherine Ndereba, Brigid Koskei, and Hellen Obiri have what it takes to ensure that women athletes are treated with dignity and are allowed the freedom to play their meaningful roles in society.

Sports for peace and development

While it might be the case that Tegla followed her dharma as a long-distance runner, she aligned herself with the needs of her context and society. Sports were not entirely her end but a means to serve humanity, a way station, not a destination. “For me, sport is not just about competing and winning or achieving fame and glory. Rather, I see sport as a worthy platform that can help unite the world, bring peace where there is war and help foster the spirit of brotherliness.” Tegla explains her involvement with Sport for Development and Peace (SDP), saying that it is an intentional use of sport, physical activity and play to attain specific development and peace objectives.

But way before the 5 May 2010 Inaugural Plenary Session of the United Nations that approved the Sport for Development and Peace International Working Group (SDP IWG), Tegla Loroupe had started using sports to effect social change in communities, having established the Tegla Loroupe Peace Foundation (TLPF) in 2003, whose aim was to put an end to the conflict between Kenya’s pastoralist communities. The foundation’s mission is based on three pillars: peacebuilding, education and supporting refugee athletes.  From 2003 to date, the Foundation has sponsored a series of annual Peace Marathons dubbed “Peace through Sports”. With the support of Prince Albert of Monaco, Tegla has also established the Kapenguria Peace Academy that takes in children from conflict areas in East Africa.

While it might be the case that Tegla followed her dharma as a long-distance runner, she aligned herself with the needs of her context and society.

Tegla was named the 2016 United Nations Person of the Year and in the same year was featured in the Olympians for Life exhibition for her work in promoting peace. Tegla was also the Chef de Mission of the Refugee Team, leading the first Refugee Olympic Team to the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio to “remind the world of the sufferings and perseverance of millions of refugees around the world.”

Using sports as a tool to bring about social transformation in relation to conflicts, education, health, and the plight of refugees has elevated Tegla’s standing in Kenya, in the region, and globally, and brought her accolades. A unique woman who originates from a society in which men may themselves be the instigators and prosecutors of conflict and war, her effectiveness and that of fellow elite athletes is increasingly becoming a subject area for social movement theorists. It has been noted that their mobilization of resources, the pursuit of political opportunities, and devising a collective action frame have been possible not just because of the extant positioning of the athletes in the impacted communities, the active involvement in and personal investment of the athletes in the outcome of the peace-promoting activities, but also because of the unique Olympic ethos driving their action.

Tegla and others like her are described as “social movement entrepreneurs”. They do not just appear as mere “evangelists” who only demonstrate their solidarity with a cause by their “presence” at an event but act as businesspeople who must see results; as others “preach with their occasional presence”, they do more.