The subject of my tenth blog post for History’s Hidden Heroines is Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was also the first woman from East and Central Africa to take a doctorate and the first ever female professor in her home country of Kenya. In the words of Dr Yoseph Araya:
[Wangari] “fought against and overcame societal prejudice because of her gender, ethnicity, cultural setting, time and finally, political atmosphere … Her non-conformity meant she paid dearly and personally for her choices – from beatings at rallies, political isolation, losing her job, becoming bankrupt, family break-up, and even losing her personal freedom by going to jail. Yet she seems to have come out with no bitterness and resumed her peaceful struggle, eventually reaching greater heights, including government minister when democratic reforms came.”
Born on April 1 1940, Wangari Maathai grew up in Nyeri County, located in the central highlands of Kenya. She grew up in the rural Kenyan countryside and was sent to St. Cecilia Intermediary, a mission school, for her primary education. After finishing school Wangari 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. She obtained her bachelor of science in biology in 1964 at Mount St. Scholastica College, then attended the University of Pittsburgh, where she graduated with a masters in biological sciences.
Wangari returned to a newly independent Kenya in 1966, and five years later became the first woman in East Africa to earn a doctorate, gaining a PhD from the University of Nairobi in 1971. After graduation she taught at the University of Nairobi, eventually becoming a chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy. Her early work as a vet took her to some of Kenya's poorest areas, where she saw first-hand the environmental degradation caused by deforestation. The result was more drought, loss of biodiversity and increased poverty. The experience, she said, made her determined to address the linked root causes of poverty and environmental destruction.
Realisation that communities were destroying their own resources led Wangari to set up the Green Belt movement, arguably her greatest legacy. Established in 1977, it was a grass-roots movement attempting to tackle deforestation and the threat it poses to the means of subsistence of the agricultural population. It was aimed at women, encouraging them to plant trees in their local environment with a small monetary reward. Though the Green Belt Movement’s main aim was to introduce ecological thinking, as it became clear to Wangari that responsible governance of the environment was impossible without democratic space, the tree became a symbol for the democratic struggle in Kenya and a way of challenging corruption and environmental mismanagement.
Wangari came to prominence in 1989 when she led a campaign to stop the construction of a multimillion-pound office development in Uhuru Park, Nairobi's equivalent of Hyde Park in London. The complex was about to be built when Wangari and other pro-democracy supporters successfully challenged President Daniel arap Moi in the courts. As a result, she found herself on a list of people targeted by the government for assassination in 1992. For protection, Wangari barricaded herself in her home for three days before the police broke in to arrest her. She and others were charged with sedition and treason and were only released after an international campaign. Not to be deterred, Wangari took part in a hunger strike in Uhuru Park to pressure the government to release other political prisoners. After four days, she and three others were beaten up by the police. This time Moi called her "a mad woman" who was "a threat to the order and security of the country". For the next few years she lived in fear of her life, and was even forced into hiding in 1993 after Moi claimed she was responsible for leaflets inciting Kikuyus to attack Kalenjins.
As her political thinking developed, Wangari became increasingly critical of the World Bank, the IMF, Britain and other former colonial powers. Increasingly she sided with the world's poorest people, becoming a hero of the worldwide ecological and African democracy movements. In the early 1990s, Wangari moved into mainstream Kenyan politics and set up Mazingira, the Kenyan Green Party. She won 98% of the votes in her constituency in 2002, joining the coalition that finally overthrew Moi in 2002 and serving as junior environment minister between January 2003 and November 2005.
In 2004, seemingly out of the blue, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It gave her an international profile and a strong platform to travel the world, pressing home the message that ecology and democracy were indivisible. In 2005, she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador to the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem by the eleven Heads of State in the Congo region. Then in 2006, she led a UNEP tree-planting scheme that has resulted in more than seven billion trees being planted across the planet.
In recognition of her deep commitment to the environment, the United Nations Secretary-General named Wangari a UN Messenger of Peace in December 2009, with a focus on the environment and climate change. In 2010 she was appointed to the Millennium Development Goals Advocacy Group and became a trustee of the Karura Forest Environmental Education Trust, established to safeguard the public land for whose protection she had fought for almost twenty years. That same year, in partnership with the University of Nairobi, she founded the Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies (WMI).
In her last years, she took on the commercial palm plantations that have destroyed so much of Indonesia and Malaysia and lobbied politicians to address climate change, which she said was hurting women the most. She died on 25 September 2011 of complications arising from ovarian cancer while receiving treatment at a Nairobi hospital. She is buried at the institute bearing her name.
Her Nobel peace prize recognition summarises her contribution as this: “Maathai's mobilisation of African women was not limited in its vision to work for sustainable development; but saw tree-planting in a broader perspective which included democracy, women's rights, and international solidarity.”
Bibliography
Araya, Joseph. “Wangari Maathai: standing up for women and the environment.” The Open University. 2021. https://www.open.edu/openlearn/nature-environment/environmental-studies/wangari-maathai-standing-women-and-the-environment [Accessed 25 June 2021].
The Green Belt Movement. “Wangari Maathai Biography.” 2021. https://www.greenbeltmovement.org/wangari-maathai/biography [Accessed 2 July 2021]
Vidal, John. “Wangari Maathai obituary.” The Guardian. 2011. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/26/wangari-maathai [Accessed 2 July 2021]
Wangari Maathai Foundation. “About Wangari Maathai.” 2021. https://wangarimaathai.org/wangaris-story [Accessed 25 June 2021].
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