En garde! Fencing draws Nairobi youngsters away from guns.

A police officer pointing a gun at Mburu Wanyoike’s head was his Saul-to-Paul, Damascus moment.

He was 17 years old and out for a late-night walk in Mathare, the informal settlement in the Kenyan capital where he lived. The officer was searching for members of a gang who had committed a robbery the day before, and mistakenly thought Mr. Wanyoike was one of them. 

He wasn’t, but he was also no stranger to that life. By that point, he had been a gun runner for another gang in the area for three years. He had been shot twice, and several friends had been killed.

But with the cop’s gun leveled at his forehead, he had a sudden realization. “I knew that I had to change my ways,” he remembers. 

He started distancing himself from his gang, and working out regularly to channel his energy in a different direction. Two years later, a fencing coach suggested he try the sport. Mr. Wanyoike was quickly hooked. In 2021, he opened a fencing club in the same neighborhood where he once smuggled guns, hoping to give other young people a positive outlet to channel their energies, too.

So far, it has been a success. Fifteen members of his club are on Kenya’s national fencing team. Mr. Wanyoike himself would have competed in the African Olympic qualifiers in Algeria recently, if torrential rains in Nariobi had not delayed his flight beyond his starting time.

But the club’s challenges – especially the prohibitive costs of fencing – mirror broader difficulties faced by many African athletes trying to reach the global elite. 

Make a plan

It’s a few minutes past 8 a.m. in Mathare, and a conductor leans out of the back of a minibus, calling out its destination. His voice rises above the din of the busy street, where tin shacks jostle for space with stout apartment blocks and small informal shops. 

This is home to the Tsavora Fencing Mtaani club, whose name loosely translates to “great neighborhood fencing club.”  

The club’s luminous green walls are decorated with inspiring phrases such as “Take action” and “Make a plan.” A group of fencers, local high school students, starts filing in for their daily practice.

“The equipment room was left open, and you are all late,” Mr. Wanyoike barks. “Give me 20.”

“Yes, Coach,” they all shout in unison, dropping to the floor to do the push-ups. 

Sixteen-year-old Eline Marendes took up fencing two years ago on a whim. At the time, she was part of an acting troupe that moved around Mathare on weekends to teach people about social issues.

“I chanced upon Wanyoike at a television station where we had gone for an interview,” she says. He invited her to check out his gym, and she says she found the idea of a sport involving sword fighting thrilling. 

Eline is soft-spoken, but once she puts on a glove and grips an epee – the slender, blunt sword she uses to fence – her competitive nature takes charge. 

At the Thursday practice, she lunges at a teammate with whom she is fighting. The tip of her weapon grazes the other fighter just below her chest. At the same moment, her opponent lands her own jab. 

The referee gives the point to Eline’s opponent. “Ref, that was definitely [my] point, and you know it,” she says indignantly.

Watching in studious silence is Mr. Wanyoike. He has been training in epee – one of the three main styles of fencing – for nine years.

Three years ago, he opened this club to create a safe space for young people in Mathare, he says. “Most of the youth here can, and do, easily get lost in crime or drugs.”

Building a new sport

But fencing – a sport that has its roots as a leisure activity among European aristocrats – is expensive. Mr. Wanyoike says it typically costs a young fencer in Kenya about $2,500 a year to train and compete, an impossibly high sum in a neighborhood where most families live on less than $3 a day.

To fund his operation, Mr. Wanyoike works as a fencing coach at private schools in Nairobi. He pays for his students’ equipment – which they share – with donations and maintains it using money he earns competing as a fencer himself. His students dream of the Olympics, but that would require building a ranking at smaller international competitions first. And that, of course, takes money, too. 

At the moment, Kenya has just one Olympic-level fencer. Alexandra Ndolo, who is ranked 14th in the world in women’s epee, has a Kenyan father but grew up in Germany. She competed for Germany for most of her career before beginning to represent Kenya in 2022. 

“So far, I have organised and financed all of my fencing seasons,” Ms. Ndolo wrote on Instagram last year. “I have planned, booked, and paid for every training camp and competition,” she explained, adding that this was “unheard of for a fencer.” 

Less-well-known fencers need outside help, says Stephen Okalo, the secretary-general of the Kenya Fencing Federation and Mr. Wanyoike’s former coach. “We need more competition halls, more referees, and many more fencers to attend international competitions for the sport to really grow,” he says.

Fencing is not the only sport in which Kenya has many talented athletes but too few resources, says Francis Mutuku, secretary-general of the National Olympic Committee of Kenya. 

Indeed, the country will compete in only a handful of sports at the Paris Olympics later this year, with the majority of its five dozen athletes participating in athletics. 

Mr. Wanyoike had dreamed of being part of the team marching beneath Kenya’s flag along the Seine in July. It would have been an uphill battle to get that far, he knows; most of his opponents on the international level have trained since childhood. It was especially disappointing that he did not get a chance to qualify because weather conditions delayed his flight, but he is not giving up.

“I will continue to focus on my training regimen,” he told the Monitor. “My main focus now is the 2028 Olympics.”

Back at Tsavora Fencing Mtaani club, practice is wrapping up. Mr. Wanyoike gathers his students around him for a quick pep talk as the students peel off their uniforms and prepare to filter back into the city outside. 

“Don’t let the environment you find yourself in define who you become,” he says.