16 Days of Activism: Three warriors turn personal tragedy into triumph against gender violence
Josina Ziyaya Machel, a human rights activist from Mozambique and GBV survivor speaking at Trademark Hotel in Nairobi on November 25, 2024 during the launch of United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime(UNODC)/UN Women Femicide report.
Trauma can break you open and shatter you into unrecognisable pieces of yourself. Trauma can also inspire change and action that can impact generations. Athlete Viola Lagat, activist Njeri wa Migwi, and Nelson Mandela’s stepdaughter and activist Josina Machel, might seem to have little in common, yet they are bonded by shared trauma from gender-based violence (GBV) - some of it their own, and some carried from the stories they dealt with in the line of duty.
I met them during the launch of a report by UN Women and the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime titled Femicides in 2023: Global Estimates of Female Intimate Partner/Family Member Homicides. According to the report, approximately 51,100 women and girls were killed by their intimate partners or other family members in 2023. Africa had the highest number of victims at 2.9 victims per 100,000.
One death is one death too many, and these three women brought a face to these statistics as nothing else could.
Many Kenyans may know Viola as a Kenyan long distance runner and world champion, but what they may not know is that the brutal murder of her childhood friend, Agnes Jebet Tirop, by her husband, almost broke her.
“I didn’t know Agnes had been a victim of GBV for a very long time, since high school. By the time she died, she’d endured countless injuries that, to me as an outsider, seemed like regular running injuries. But they were the result of beatings and intentional harm aimed at ending her career,” she shared. Inspired by her friend’s experience and that of other female athletes, she joined forces with Agnes’s family to start Tirop Angels, to honour her fallen friend and to prevent other athletes from suffering a similar fate.
Njeri wa Migwi, a survivor of GBV, spoke about how Ivy Wangui’s murder in the hands of her boyfriend, who drove seven hours to the university where she was studying and hacked her to death with an axe in broad daylight in 2019, drove her to start Usikimye, an NGO that’s working towards ending the prevalence of sexual and gender-based violence. One way they do this is by tackling hunger and poverty.
Punched her eye
“Our feeding program serves 500 children a day. It’s an opportunity for us to speak to them about their sexual and reproductive health and rights. We also have a pact with the parents; that the children won’t go to the streets to beg as this would expose them to SGBV,” she explained.
About a decade ago Josina Machel’s boyfriend punched her so hard in her right eye that it raptured, blinding her permanently. Her vision to see a world free of violence against women, however, remained intact. Her ordeal led her to start the Kuhluka Movement to empower women who were victims and survivors of GBV, and her story is her weapon.
To paraphrase Josina, we can't afford not to take a stand against GBV as neutrality means you are siding with the perpetrators. Do something using what you have.
Ms Oneya comments on social and gender topics. @FaithOneya; [email protected]
