NAIROBI : As the first Kenyan to be signed by top e-sports companies XiT Woundz and UYU, Sylvia Gathoni is used to vanquishing opponents with a combination of frenzied kicks and punches in the male-dominated video game tournament circuit.
"I insist on being recognised as an e-sport athlete, not a female e-sport athlete," she said at a gaming parlour in Kenya's capital Nairobi. QueenArrow, as Gathoni is known in the gaming world, found early success fighting as the character Ling Xiaoyu, a pig-tailed Chinese teen, in the hand-to-hand combat game Tekken, winning her first major competition in 2019.For Mary Wanjiku, a supervisor at the Tric Gaming Cafe in Nairobi, Gathoni has helped kicked down the door for other young women in an overwhelmingly male arena.Her success has helped assuage her parents' concerns in a country where gaming retains social stigma.