Queen of Rope

How twelve women over thirty in Nyandarua are climbing a dynasty of African queens — one skip at a time.

It started with a walk

Early this year, in our capacity as Nyandarua County's official fitness partner, we were asked to help condition Rufas — the county's immunization champion — for a 62-kilometre walk to get people talking about immunization. He made the distance. And afterwards, in the speeches, someone handed us a challenge that wasn't quite a contract and wasn't quite a joke: make Nyandarua the fittest county in the republic.

That was the genesis of everything that followed.

The first question wasn't what exercise — it was for whom. Here a doctor's eye had to step in. Our outpatient clinics are full of people carrying lifestyle diseases that movement could have softened, or prevented entirely. And one group keeps getting squeezed out of the conversation: women over thirty. This is the season where you're raising children, holding down work, and running a home all at once — and exercise is the first thing to fall off the list. Not because these women don't care, but because there's no hour left to give. So we built for them, on purpose: the hardest group to reach, chosen deliberately. We called it the Nyandarua Women 30+ Movement Series.

Then — why rope? Because it costs almost nothing, it can be done in your own yard, and, this part matters, it's already ours. Most women in Nyandarua grew up skipping. I was born and raised here, so I can say that with confidence. We weren't importing a foreign fitness fad; we were handing back something familiar — and rope skipping, done properly, pays you back out of all proportion to how simple it looks: real cardiovascular fitness, real coordination.

Why run it on WhatsApp? Same logic. Everyone already has it. No new app, no learning curve, nothing to figure out — you skip, you record, you send, on the tool already in your hand.

And underneath all of it, one more aim: to give these women something most programs forget — a community. Not a solo grind, but a place to belong, built around movement.

Meet the women

None of them had the time. All of them found it.

Nancy. At 56, she's one of our oldest skippers — soft-spoken, with a heart of gold and the quiet, relentless work ethic of an ant. She's only recently found her way back into fitness, and in May alone she logged 11,435 verified skips. That's more than 350 a day, every single day of the month. It puts her at number four on the board, and anyone watching her climb can see the top three aren't as far off as they look.

Dr Jane. She skips as Invicta — unconquered — which is the only handle that would fit her. She's a doctor: brilliant, with the heart of a lion, carrying her own family and everyone else's, because that's what the work asks. She's an athlete besides — she has represented Nyandarua in inter-county badminton, and runs a racket-stringing business on the side. Her morning begins like the others' — child up, ready, off to school — and then she's at the hospital: ward rounds on expectant mothers, then theatre, where on an average day three of her cases turn into emergency C-sections. Some nights she's pulled from bed at midnight for a delivery that won't wait. And in the gaps between the lives she saves, she found time to skip her way to number three and — for now — into the Order of Nzinga, the unconquerable. Invicta is right.

Carol. Carol came to win. One of the most fiercely competitive people I've ever met — and she runs Runda Academy, the school I trust with my own children. You'll catch her skipping in the schoolyard with her pupils cheering her on, a grown woman showing a generation of kids that movement is something you carry for life, not something you leave behind. She sits at number two with 32,710 skips, barely fifteen hundred behind the leader. And she's competitive enough to have broken the app: she kept hitting the video upload limit because she wanted to submit more, and forced us to raise the cap. Carol outgrew the tool, so we rebuilt the tool.

Ruth. Resilience with a timetable. Six days a week her job sits sixty kilometres away, round trip, on public transport. She has a small child. Her day starts at five: get herself ready, get her child ready for school, the long commute, a full day's work, the commute home, homework at the kitchen table — and then, in whatever the evening has left, she skips. After that she sits down to prepare content for her radio show. Ruth found her way through depression in the boxing ring, alongside her coach Lemid, who heads the Nakuru Amateur Boxing Club, and she carries that same fight into her Sunday show, Kaihuri ka Ugi. When Ruth uses the word resilience, she isn't borrowing it. And look at the board: right now, she's first. 34,160 skips — more than anyone else in the county — squeezed into the cracks of the most punishing day on this whole list. Whether she's still first by midnight is another question entirely.

How you climb

Here's what hooks people: you don't just pile up a number. You rise through an order of African queens, and every rung carries a name — and a woman — behind it.

You join the moment you register, in the Order of Moremi, for Moremi Ajasoro of Ile-Ife, who gave herself up to save her people. Your first verified skip makes you Idia, the Benin queen mother who led armies and counselled kings. After that you climb on your skips alone:

• Nandi — 500 skips. The Zulu queen who raised Shaka from nothing. Resilience.
• Makeda — 2,000. The Queen of Sheba, whose wisdom was legend. Knowledge.
• Amina — 5,000. The warrior queen of Zazzau, who pushed her borders for thirty-four years. Warrior spirit.
• Nzinga — 10,000. The Angolan queen who fought the Portuguese for thirty years and never bent. The unconquerable.
• Yaa — 25,000. Yaa Asantewaa of the Ashanti, who at seventy led her people into war against an empire. Fearless eldership.

Yaa is the highest anyone in Nyandarua has reached. On the 29th of May, two women crossed twenty-five thousand skips to claim it: Ruth and Carol, the rivals you've already met, locked at the top of the board and crowned together. Sit with whose name that order carries — a woman of seventy who refused to sit down — and then look at who earned it here: women over thirty, with children, jobs, and midnight shifts.

But here's the thing: I'm writing this on the last day of the month, and nothing is settled. Ruth leads Carol by barely fifteen hundred skips — a gap Carol could erase before midnight and seize the top crown for herself. And Invicta, our unconquerable doctor, sits just under the line, close enough to claim the Order of Yaa tonight and make it three. By the time you read this, it may already be decided. Or it may be happening right now, in the dark, one skip at a time.

And Yaa is not the top. Three more orders stand above her — higher, and still unclaimed. No one in the county has touched them. We won't tell you their names. But they're up there, waiting for the first woman bold enough to reach them.

This is only getting started

Here's the strange part: most of Nyandarua still doesn't know this is happening. In May alone, twelve women logged 115,595 verified skips — up from under six thousand the month before. Women are climbing a dynasty of queens, outgrowing the app with sheer effort, being crowned in the Order of Yaa — and it's stayed one of the county's best-kept secrets. That ends here.

Because this was never a one-off with a winner and a closing ceremony. It's a recurring monthly contest for women over thirty, built around a community that actually shows up for each other. Every month the board resets. Every month there's a fresh climb — from the Order of Moremi all the way up, with three orders at the summit that no one has reached yet, still waiting.

So it doesn't matter that you're only hearing about this now. Nancy began again at 56. Next month's leaderboard is empty. The only question left is whether your name is on it.

Ready? It's free. Save +254 140 823802 on WhatsApp, send the message JOIN 018 QUEENS, and follow the prompts. That's it — you're in.