When Susan Wairimu Thuiya received a call on the night of 21 January saying that her daughter had been in an accident, she assumed it was a scam. She had seen that her daughter was online just an hour before, and the caller, who claimed to be from the police, was reluctant to provide any details, except to say that she was being taken to hospital.
But the official tone of a second call the next day summoning her to the police station made her drop everything and head to the precinct, about an hour from her home in Thika, on the outskirts of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. Her husband, Patrick Thuiya Kamande, dashed over to meet her.
Their sense of trepidation was justified. Grace Wangari, 24, had died en route to the hospital. The couple tried to find out from the police what had happened, but say they received vague or inaccurate accounts until they gained access to police records, which painted a grim picture. Their daughter had died after being repeatedly stabbed, allegedly by her boyfriend during a domestic quarrel.
Vigils, dubbed “Dark Valentine”, were held across Kenya this week after a month in which more than a dozen women have been killed, allegedly by their partners. Wangari’s parents joined other families of the dead women, along with survivors, artists and activists, to pay tribute to the victims of femicide.
“We were in shock,” says Wangari’s father. Wangari had only moved out of the family home in November, and her parents did not know that she was seeing someone – much less that she was in an abusive relationship.
“If I knew she was in that kind of situation, I would have gone to get her out of it myself,” says Wairimu. Wangari had left home to be closer to the spa where she worked as a beautician and her mother believed she had been living with female flatmates in Nairobi.
Wairimu says she is haunted by recent discoveries about her daughter’s life. She was fairly close to Wangari, and recalls with sadness how she had promised to send her money the following week so she could move to a new flat. Wangari had two daughters, who now live with Wairimu. As she watches her granddaughters play, Wairimu wonders if things could have played out differently.
Wangari is one of 16 Kenyan women who have died allegedly at the hands of their partners since the start of 2024. Last month, 26-year-old Starlet Wahu was stabbed to death by a man alleged to be part of an extortionist criminal ring that targets women through dating sites. Less than two weeks later, another woman was drugged and dismembered by a man she had arranged to meet in a rented flat, with her body discarded in plastic bags.
The January killings, and dozens of others, prompted thousands to take to the streets last month, calling for an end to the scourge and for Kenya’s notoriously backlogged justice system to deal seriously with domestic violence. Today’s vigils are expected to be the country’s largest commemoration yet of the victims of gender-based violence.
“The reality of any woman living in this country [is] you always live under the banner of fear, because we’ve grown up with this. It’s ahistorical to say it’s a recent spark that has sent people over the edge,” says Muthoni Maingi, one of the conveners of the nationwide protests.
Increased social media access, Maingi says, merely provides greater visibility for women’s realities. “It has been a big driver of people beginning to understand that these are not one-off incidents,” she says.
At least 500 femicide cases have been recorded in Kenya since 2016. A majority of the killings follow systematic domestic violence, according to the platform Africa data hub, which says femicide cases are probably heavily under-reported due to miscategorisation and inadequate coverage.
“We are holding the vigils to remind the country that in [what are supposed to be] circumstances of safety and love, a lot of women meet their demise,” says Maingi.
Campaigners will also renew calls for femicide to be declared a national crisis and specifically criminalised. The crime currently falls under homicide provisions, which rights groups say do not account for the unequal power relations between men and women that drive and characterise the killings.
Families say the social normalisation of gender-based violence in Kenya needs to be addressed.
“We need to change the way we bring up our boys – to teach them to turn to communication and not brute strength when an argument arises,” says Kamande. A no-violence culture, he believes, could also encourage communities to intervene where women are at risk.
The vigils coincide with the opening of parliament this week, where organisers of the “EndFemicideKe” movement are pushing for their petition to be read out and debated. They have called for additional shelters to be built, for education about gender-based violence to be prioritised, and for quicker police and court processes.
Last month’s protests have prompted some action: the police have created a hotline where femicide cases can be reported, and a special team to expedite the investigation of femicides. Kenya’s chief justice, Martha Koome, also addressed the issue, saying that a rollout of “trauma-informed [sexual and gender-based violence] courts” across the country would help to manage the femicide threats “that have engulfed [the] nation”. But the escape of a Kenyan man accused of committing femicide in the US from a Nairobi prison has raised questions about the seriousness with which such cases are handled.
“[The measures] still feel very ‘lip-servicey’, as opposed to the deep multi-faceted changes that need to happen to put an end to this vice,” says Maingi.
Families are doubling down on calls for perpetrators to be brought to justice, and say changes on the handling of femicide cases are necessary.
“On matters like femicide which society takes lightly, you don’t just get justice,” says Kamande. “You have to demand it.”
