Wangari Maathai:FOR A young Kikuyu girl growing up in the early 1940s, the small village of Ihithe, in the lush central highlands of Kenya, was next to perfect. There were no books or gadgets in the houses, but there were leopards and elephants in the thick forests around, clean water, rich soils, and food and work for everyone.
“It was heaven. We wanted for nothing,” according to Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel peace prize winner, who has died of cancer aged 71. “Now the forests have come down, the land has been turned to commercial farming, the tea plantations keep everyone poor, and the economic system does not allow people to appreciate the beauty of where they live.”
Maathai was educated in Catholic mission schools, spending four years at Loreto Girls’ High School in Limuru, just outside the capital, Nairobi. It was run by Irish Loreto nuns, one of whom was the late Sister Joseph Teresa O’Sullivan, a charismatic former member of Cumann na mBan who had served time in Kilmainham Jail for her republican activities. She triggered the young Maathai’s interest in scientific discovery.
"During breaks, she would ask me to come and help her wash Petri dishes and test tubes in the lab," Maathai recalled in her autobiography, Unbowed. "Through our many conversations she aroused and encouraged my lifelong interest in science – at that time, chemistry, later, biology."
Maathai remained close to her former mentor and the other Irish Loreto Sisters, whom she credited also with shaping her outlook on social justice. “After my education by the nuns, I emerged as a person who believed that society is inherently good and that people generally act for the best.”
After graduating in 1959, she won a scholarship to study in the US, as part of the “Kennedy airlift” in which 300 Kenyans – including Barack Obama’s father – were chosen to study at American universities in 1960. After further study in Germany, she returned to a newly independent Kenya in 1966, and five years later become the first woman in east and central Africa to obtain a PhD from an African university. There followed a tumultuous personal and public 40 years in which she ran the University of Nairobi’s veterinary department, was imprisoned several times, stood for president, became a minister and won the Nobel peace prize. Her early work as a vet took her to some of Kenya’s poorest areas, where she saw first-hand the degradation of the environment and the stress it put on the lives of women who produced most of the food.
It also coincided with her marriage to Mwangi Mathai, a young Kenyan politician who had also studied in the US. The union, she said later, was “a catastrophe”. He left her in 1977, suing for divorce and saying she was too strong-minded and that he was unable to control her. When she later, perhaps unwisely, referred in a magazine interview to the divorce judge as “either incompetent or corrupt”, she was charged with contempt of court and sentenced to six months in prison. She served only a few days, but when her husband demanded she drop his surname, she defiantly added an “a”.
In 1977, she set up the Green Belt movement, more in hope than expectation that it would grow. Initially, the movement’s tree-planting activities did not address issues of democracy and peace, but it soon became clear to her that responsible governance of the environment was impossible without democratic space.
As she became more vocal in her criticism of Kenyan elites, she ran headfirst into the corruption and casual brutality that surrounded then president Daniel arap Moi.
In 1992, she found herself on a list of people targeted by the government for assassination.
In 1993, she was forced into hiding after Moi claimed she was responsible for leaflets inciting Kikuyus to attack Kalenjins.
As her political thinking developed, she became increasingly critical of worldwide governance. Her falling-out with politicians in Kenya reflected her deep disillusionment with the World Bank, the IMF, Britain and other former colonial powers.
By this time, the Green Belt was flourishing. What began as a few women planting trees became a network of 600 community groups who cared for 6,000 tree nurseries, which were often supervised by disabled and mentally ill people in the villages. By 2004, more than 30 million trees had been planted, and the movement had branches in 30 countries. In Kenya, it has become an unofficial agricultural advice service, a community regeneration project and a job-creation plan all in one.
In the early 1990s, Maathai moved into mainstream politics. She set up Mazingira, the Kenyan Green Party, winning 98 per cent of the votes in her constituency, and then joined the coalition that finally overthrew Moi in 2002. She was a junior environment minister in the government of president Mwai Kibaki between January 2003 and November 2005.
In 2004, seemingly out of the blue, she was awarded the Nobel peace prize, to the consternation of many politicians and governments who still did not see the “peace” connection between human rights and the environment. It gave her an international profile and a strong platform to travel the world, pressing home the message that ecology and democracy were indivisible.
Two daughters, Wanjira and Muta, and a son, Waweru, survive her, as well as her granddaughter, Ruth.
Wangari Maathai: born April 1st, 1940; died September 25th, 2011