- EDITOR’S BRIEF: The victim’s life was marked by struggles, but she managed to overcome them and build a life for herself and her family. Her death is a tragedy, and her community’s anger and frustration are understandable. The police need to bring the culprits to justice and prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.
On April 11, 2023, a woman in Kenya was attacked, gang-raped, tortured, and murdered in her home in Muthigiriri village. The woman, who had abandoned her journey to become a Catholic nun in the early 1980s, was known as the “nun” by her customers. Despite abandoning the nun path, she continued to wear a religious headscarf throughout her life as a mark of her faith.
The police retrieved the victim’s body from her house, which showed attack injuries on her face, neck, and arms, suggesting sexual assault. The incident report by the scene of crime detectives revealed that the victim appeared to have been tortured and fed salty water, possibly to disclose what was being sought in the ransacking.
The police are yet to find the culprits, and the community has issued a two-day ultimatum to either shoot dead or arrest the suspects, failing which they would look for them.
The woman’s son, who reported his mother’s death, narrated how he became suspicious after she failed to open her sugarcane kiosk in Murang’a town as usual. Her daughter found the door locked from the outside when she arrived home in the evening, and when she used the spare keys to access the house, she found her mother sprawled, naked, and with visible injuries in the bedroom.
In a recent interview in March 2023, the victim had narrated how she was pressured by her family members to abandon the nunnery and start a family. After deserting under pressure in 1983, she immediately got married but found it difficult to discard the headscarf.
She came out of the marriage with four children and became a tenant, and depended on odd jobs to foot the bills. Her two sons dropped out of school at the primary level, but she concentrated on educating her daughters, one of whom dropped out while the other finished Form Four. She worked hard and gave each of her children capital to start businesses and became a proud mother of four independent children and a grandmother to seven.
In 1997, she ventured into the sugarcane business and would make a Sh200 profit on a good day. She saved with Family Bank and got herself into table banking arrangements. In 2017, she paid a Sh180,000 deposit for a Sh300,000 worth of a quarter-acre piece of land and settled the balance, making her a homeowner.
