Caryce Chepchirchir Tirop

Chepchirchir Tirop, PhD Candidate Stanford University (PhD Candidate)
Chepchirchir Tirop is an historian of Africa born and raised in Eldoret, Kenya. She is broadly interested in the social and cultural histories of East Africa. Her previous research has been on the Indian diaspora in Kenya focusing on questions of memory, identity formation, and nation building in independent Kenya. Her current dissertation project is a history of athletics in Kenya from 1945-2020 focusing on labor dynamics in the sport through a local and global perspective. At Stanford, Chepchirchir is affiliated with the Center for African Studies and is a member of the University AME Zion Church where she sings in the choir. Chepchirchir enjoys reading novels by African authors and is currently trying to read a novel from each African country.

Abstract

Somali, Turkana, Samburu and Maasai in the Kenyan sports scene
My presentation is concerned with the marginalization of certain communities in the Kenyan sports scene, including the Somali, Turkana, Samburu and Maasai. Despite their potential in Kenya’s most successful sport, long distance running, these communities are still marginal to the sporting scenes. I attribute this marginalization to three main factors: 1) colonial space making that effectively cast the northern region as beyond the realm of developmental governance and instead used it as a buffer between northern and southern Kenya; 2) late colonial welfare initiatives that used sports as
primarily a disciplining initiative thus discriminating against different African communities; 3) actions by Africans who did not always fully and unquestioningly embrace the colonial state’s initiatives. Thus this presentation highlights colonial legacies in the practice of postcolonial cultural forms of which sport is one. The presentation concludes with an exploration of initiatives from within and outside these communities that have sought to make sports more accessible and the consequences of these initiatives.