This article was first published in issue 5 of ARISE Magazine.
Words James Doorne Photo Martin Godwin/Guardian News & Media 2007
Before Live Earth, before Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar, even before Sting worked the chat-show circuit with Raoni the Kayapó Indian chief in tow; before all that, when no-one wanted to know about green issues, there was Wangari Maathai.
Born on April 1 1940 in the Nyeri District of Kenya, Maathai was an accomplished student and, aged 20, won a scholarship to study in America. She gained a bachelor’s degree in biology and a Master of Science before returning to Kenya to work at the University College of Nairobi. In 1971, she became the first EasternAfrican woman to receive a PhD and went on to work as a senior lecturer in veterinary medicine and associate professor – the first time in the country’s history that these positions had been held by a woman. But the catalyst for her journey to revered activist and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate was her formation of the Green Belt Movement in 1977.
The initial idea behind it was simple: to counter the effects of deforestation by convincing people – mostly women from poorer regions in Kenya – to plant trees. It wasn’t an easy sell. Many people were reluctant as they knew nothing about planting trees – and neither did Maathai. But that didn’t matter. “We shall use our common sense, or our ‘woman sense’, and so just do what we do with other seeds,” she told them. In the three decades since, 900,000 ‘foresters without diplomas’, as she calls them, have planted 40 million Green Belt trees across Africa.
Until relatively recently, green issues in the West were shorthand for dreary worthiness but in Kenya they were a matter of life and death – especially if they put you at odds with government policy. Maathai has been arrested, imprisoned and beaten on several occasions. She has been charged with sedition, treason and spreading malicious rumours. Once she had to barricade herself in her own home for three days when speculation spread that her life was at risk.
On another occasion, when she protested against the proposed development of a piece of Kakura Forest into a golf course by planting a single seed as near to the site as she could get, she was set upon by security guards who caused injuries that required a three-day stay in hospital. She complained to the police, and when they did nothing she made a formal complaint – signed in her own blood from the head wound she sustained in the attack.
On several occasions her political nemesis, Kenya’s President Daniel arap Moi, criticised her in graceless terms, suggesting that she should be quiet and respect men more, labelling her a “mad woman” who had “bugs in her head”.
In the 2002 election in which Moi lost power, Maathai was elected to government with a 98 per cent share of the vote and took up the position of Deputy Minister in the Ministry of Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife. In 2004 she became the first African woman – and the first environmentalist – to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in recognition of the greater significance of environmentalism in regions where many conflicts stem from the fight to control scarce resources. The awarding committee praised her for her contribution to “sustainable development, democracy
and peace”.
To this day, people continue to plant for the planet. And Maathai’s office has a picture of her with Barack Obama planting a tree in Uhuru Park, Nairobi – a place she was once attacked and arrested. She continues to live a colourful and influential life. “Let me recall the words of Gandhi,” she says, “My life is my message. Also, plant a tree!”