KENYA’S WANGARI Maathai, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, has died at the age of 71 in Nairobi.
The first African woman to win the prize, the Green Belt Movement she founded in 1971 has planted close to 40 million trees across Africa, campaigning for environmental conservation.
“It is with great sadness that the family of Professor Wangari Maathai announces her passing away on 25th September 2011 at the Nairobi hospital after a prolonged and bravely borne struggle with cancer,” the Green Belt Movement said in a statement.
Born in Nyeri, a small town at the foot of Mount Kenya in 1940, she was a trailblazer from an early age. In 1959 she won a scholarship to study in Kansas, where she completed a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences.
She went on to become the first woman from East Africa to receive a Phd, teaching veterinary medicine at the University of Nairobi.
It was through her voluntary work that she came to prominence. She encouraged women to plant trees, which provided firewood and protected the soil and water sources.
Her influence “knew no bounds” said Davinder Lamba, executive director of the Mazingira Institute, one of Kenya’s oldest NGOs. “It wasn’t just on the environment that she contributed to Kenyan society. It was in politics and on women’s rights as well.” This first became apparent in 1989, when she stood up to the authoritarian regime of President Daniel Arup Moi, who sought to take away public land in Nairobi’s Uhuru park to build a multistorey office block and statue of himself.
Denounced as a “crazy woman” by the government, her insistence on defending the public interest through the courts was successful when international backers pulled out. She was elected as an MP in December 2002, in the first free-and-fair elections in Kenya for a generation.