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,"
Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist and
Nobel peace prize
winner, who has died of cancer aged 71, told me when I saw her last in
Nairobi. "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 lucky. If she had been born even a year
later, she and her family would have probably been caught up in the Mau
Mau uprising that raged around Ihithe, and it is unlikely that she would
have got any kind of education at all. "You would see me there now: I
most likely would have stayed in Ihithe, married, had children, and
continued to work the land. I would not tell stories, because they have
been replaced by radio, books and TV," she said.
As it was, her
family sent her away to a primary school run by Italian nuns, where she
excelled. But her remarkable academic rise to become the first woman to
run a university department in Kenya was due entirely to her closeness
to nature. It was the land that showed her and taught her everything,
she said.
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 firsthand the degradation of the environment and the stress it put
on the lives of women who produced most of the food. Kenya's forests
were being cleared and replaced by commercial plantations. 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.
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", but it led to her championing the cause of women
for the rest of her life: "I should have known that ambition and success
were not to be expected in an African woman. An African woman should be
a good African woman whose qualities should be coyness, shyness,
submissiveness, incompetence and crippling dependency. A highly educated
independent African woman is bound to be dominant, aggressive,
uncontrollable, a bad influence."
Mwangi Mathai 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 only served a few days, but when her husband
demanded she drop his surname, she defiantly chose to add an extra "a". Realisation
that communities were destroying their own resources led her to work
directly with the poorest. It was the women, she reasoned, who
experienced the worst impact of a degraded environment. In 1977, she set
up the Green Belt movement, more in hope than expectation that it
would grow.
"They lack wood fuel, water, food and fodder. They are
poor, have no cash income and are confined to rural life," she told me.
"They find themselves in a vicious cycle of debilitating poverty, lost
self-confidence and a never-ending struggle to meet their most
basic needs." Initially, the Green Belt 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. The tree became a symbol for the
democratic struggle in Kenya and a way of challenging widespread abuses
of power, corruption and environmental mismanagement. She and others
planted trees in Uhuru park, Nairobi, to demand the release of prisoners
of conscience and a peaceful transition to democracy. But as she
became more vocal in her criticism of Kenyan elites, she ran headfirst
into the corruption and casual brutality that surrounded President
Daniel arap Moi. There had been attempts before to dismiss her as mad or
foolish, but she 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,
backed by the media tycoon Robert Maxwell, was about to be built when
Maathai and other pro-democracy individuals challenged Moi in the
courts. The international campaign succeeded and the development was
scuppered. Moi and the political establishment were furious.
In
1992, she found herself on a list of people targeted by the government
for assassination. For protection, and as a defiant statement, she
publicly 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 a campaign orchestrated by
the Kennedys.
Maathai and the rest did not stop there. They took
part in a hunger strike in Uhuru park, which they labelled Freedom
Corner, to pressure the government to release 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 increasingly threatened and vilified by political
leaders. 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. Increasingly she sided with the
world's poorest people, becoming a hero of the worldwide ecological and
African democracy movements. "The elites have become predators,
self-serving and only turning to people when they need them. We can
never all be equal, but we can ensure we do not allow excessive poverty
or wealth. Inequality breeds insecurity," she said.
By this time,
the Green Belt was flourishing. What began as a few women planting trees
became a network of 600 community groups that cared for 6,000 tree
nurseries, which were often supervised by disabled and mentally ill
people in the villages. By 2004, more than 30m 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 Kenyan politics. She set up Mazingira, the
Kenyan Green Party, winning 98% 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. She later planned to run for
president but claims she was tricked out of it.
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. In 2006, she led a Unep tree-planting
scheme that has resulted in more than 7bn trees being planted across the
planet.
In her last years, she took on the commercial palm
plantations that have destroyed so much of Indonesia and Malaysia and
badgered politicians to address climate change, which she said was
hurting women the most.
"The tree is just a symbol for what
happens to the environment. The act of planting one is a symbol of
revitalising the community. Tree-planting is only the entry point into
the wider debate about the environment. Everyone should plant a tree,"
she told me. She is survived by two daughters, Wanjira and Muta, and a son, Waweru, as well as her granddaughter, Ruth.
References and Acknowledgement to following:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/26/wangari-maathai,
http://www.greenbeltmovement.org/w.php?id=59
