page_title: Hulda Stumpf
section_title: Arrival
hierarchical_section_title: Hulda Stumpf / Work in Africa / Arrival
caption_attribution_description: English: USS Huron (ID-1408) in port at Newport News, Virginia, 11 July 1919.
context_page_description: Hulda Jane Stumpf 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.
  Stumpf may have been killed because of the mission's opposition to female genital mutilation. 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 had genitally mutilated her, although a court concluded that there was no evidence she had been killed because of her opposition to FGM.
context_section_description: Stumpf sailed from New York in November 1907 on the SS Friedrich der Große, arriving in Gibraltar on 12 November, and in Naples on 15 November. In December she arrived in Kijabe, Kenya, where she was assigned to work as a secretary for the head of the Africa Inland Mission. She wrote in a letter to the Indiana Gazette, dated 20 December 1907:
  Since I am anxious that you should all know something about my trip and the condition of the country as we find it in British East Africa, I am sending this general letter. I have had my first visit to a native village where goats, sheep and human beings occupy the same hut. The houses are built of bamboo and thatched with grass; the center or highest point is about ten feet, sloping to the outer edge until the door or hole to crawl through is about three feet high. ... The chief occupation for the men is herding goats; the women do the gardening, wood chopping, carrying of heavy loads, etc. The women carried all our trunks and baggage from the depot up to the mission station, a distance of about three miles. It is considered a disgrace for a man to carry a load of wood, pail of water, etc.
  
  The clothing consists of a goat skin thrown carelessly over the shoulder, and a great deal of tin and brass jewelry; rings on the ankles, toes, neck and ears, also bands or strings of beads around the head and waist. ... The chief timber just near us is wild olive and cedar. ... The roses and geraniums grow like trees almost and bloom continually. Ferns of all kinds grow wild. All the way from Mombasa to Kijabe, a distance of 1575 miles, we saw banana, coconut and mangoe trees ...
caption: Stumpf sailed from New York on the SS Friedrich der Große in early November 1907.[8]
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