Hulda Jane Stumpf (10 January 1867 – 3 January 1930) was an American Christian missionary who was murdered in her home near the Africa Inland Mission station in Kijabe, Kenya, where she worked as a secretary and administrator.[1]
Stumpf may have been killed because of the mission's opposition to female genital mutilation (FGM, also known as female circumcision). Kenya's main ethnic group, the Kikuyu, regarded FGM as an important rite of passage, and there had been protests against the missionary churches in Kenya because they opposed it. The period is known within Kenyan historiography as the female circumcision controversy.
Stumpf is reported to have taken a firm stand against FGM in the Kijabe Girls' Home, which she helped to run. Some apparently unusual injuries on her body suggested to the governor of Kenya at the time that, before or after smothering her, her killer(s) had genitally mutilated her, although a court concluded that there was no evidence she had been killed because of her opposition to FGM.
- ^ For date of birth and middle name, Marvin J. Newell, A Martyr's Grace, Moody Publishers, 2006, 103–104; for death, image of Stumpf's headstone, accessed 2 October 2013.