Called a ‘mad woman’ and arrested severally for her radicalism in the fight for a better Kenya, Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in the year 2004 for her empowerment and environmental works in Kenya. In the year 1971, Maathai became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree. Maathai also served as the chairman for six years on the National Council of Women in Kenya, and introduced the idea of accomplishing the largest tree-planting campaign in Africa–the Green Belt Movement. The Movement has planted over 51 million trees in Kenya since its inception in 1977.
Maathai’s Early Life, Education And Career
Wangari Muta Maathai was born on April 1, 1940 in the village of Ihithe, Nyeri District in the central highlands of the colony of Kenya. Her family was Kikuyu, the most populous ethnic group in Kenya, and had lived in the area for several generations. She began her primary school at Ihithe Primary School but later moved to St. Cecilia’s Intermediate Primary School at age 11; a boarding school at the Mathari Catholic Mission in Nyeri where she studied for four years. Studying at St. Cecilia’s, she was sheltered from the then ongoing Mau Mau uprising, which forced her mother to move from their homestead to an emergency village in Ihithe, while her father worked on a White-owned farm in the Rift Valley, near the town of Nakuru.
When she completed her studies there in 1956, she was rated first in her class, and was granted admission to the only Catholic high school for girls in Kenya, Loreto High School in Limuru.
As the end of East African colonialism approached, Kenyan politicians, such as Tom Mboya, were proposing ways to make education in Western nations available to promising students. John F. Kennedy, then a United States senator, agreed to fund such a programme through Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, initiating what became known as the Kennedy Airlift or Airlift Africa. Maathai became one of some 300 Kenyans selected to study in the United States in September 1960.
She received a scholarship to study at Mount St. Scholastica College (now Benedictine College), in Atchison, Kansas, where she majored in biology, with minors in chemistry and German. After receiving her Bachelor of Science degree in 1964, she studied at the University of Pittsburgh for a master’s degree in biology. Her graduate studies there were funded by the Africa-America Institute, and during her time in Pittsburgh, she first experienced environmental restoration, when local environmentalists pushed to rid the city of air pollution. In January 1966, Maathai received her MSc in biological sciences, and was appointed to a position as research assistant to a professor of zoology at University College of Nairobi.
Upon returning to Kenya to start her new job at the university, Maathai was informed that it had been given to someone else. She believed this was because of gender and tribal bias. After a two-month job search, Professor Reinhold Hofmann, from the University of Giessen in Germany, offered her a job as a research assistant in the microanatomy section of the newly established Department of Veterinary Anatomy in the School of Veterinary Medicine at University College of Nairobi. In April 1966, she met Mwangi Mathai, another Kenyan who had studied in America, who would later become her husband. In 1967, at the urging of Professor Hofmann, she travelled to the University of Giessen in Germany in pursuit of a doctorate. She studied both at Giessen and the University of Munich.
In the spring of 1969, she returned to Nairobi to continue studies at the University College of Nairobi as an assistant lecturer and as well married Mwangi Mathai. Later that year, she became pregnant with her first child, Waweru. After the birth of Waweru, Maathai became the first Eastern African woman to receive a PhD, her doctorate in veterinary anatomy, from the University College of Nairobi, which became the University of Nairobi the following year. She completed her dissertation on the development and differentiation of gonads in bovines. Her daughter, Wanjira, was born in December 1971.
Maathai continued to teach at Nairobi, becoming a senior lecturer in anatomy in 1975, chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy in 1976 and associate professor in 1977. She was the first woman in Nairobi appointed to any of these positions. It is also noteworthy that Maathai and her husband, Mwangi Mathai, later separated in 1977. And after a lengthy separation, Mwangi filed for divorce in 1979. He was said to have believed that Wangari was “too strong-minded for a woman” and too difficult for him to control. Shortly after the divorce, he sent a letter via his lawyer demanding that Maathai drop his surname. But instead of dropping it entirely, she chose to add an extra “a” from Mathai to Maathai.
Why is Wangai Maathai Biografrica’s African of the Month?
Being the first African woman to win one of the most prestigious global prizes for excellence in 2004; the Nobel Peace Prize, Wangai Maathai, has set an enviable record for African women. And not just this, Wangai Maathai was also the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree. Beyond that, she served as the chairman for six years on the National Council of Women in Kenya, and introduced the idea of accomplishing the largest tree-planting campaign in Africa–the Green Belt Movement; a Movement which has planted over 51 million trees in Kenya since its inception in 1977. According to reports from the Carolina Women’s Center, Maathai’s Green Belt Movement also helped about 900,000 women in Kenya and beyond. But she had to overcome a number of obstacles personally and politically to achieve all that.
In 1974, Maathai’s husband campaigned for a seat in Parliament, hoping to represent the Langata constituency, and won. During his campaign, he had promised to find jobs to limit the rising unemployment in Kenya. These promises led Maathai to connect her ideas of environmental restoration to providing jobs for the unemployed and this led to the founding of Envirocare Ltd., a business that involved the planting of trees to conserve the environment, involving ordinary people in the process. This led to the planting of her first tree nursery, collocated with a government tree nursery in Karura Forest.
Despite funding challenges that almost ran down the programme, her conversations concerning Envirocare and her work at the Environment Liaison Centre, The United Nations Environment Programme made it possible to send Maathai to the first UN conference on human settlements, known as Habitat I, in June 1976.
In 1977, Maathai spoke to the National Council of Women in Kenya – NCWK concerning her attendance at Habitat I. She proposed further tree planting, which the council supported. On 5th June 1977, marking World Environment Day, the NCWK marched in a procession from Kenyatta International Conference Centre in downtown Nairobi to Kamukunji Park on the outskirts of the city, where they planted seven trees in honour of historical community leaders. This was the first event of the Green Belt Movement. Maathai encouraged the women of Kenya to plant tree nurseries throughout the country, searching nearby forests for seeds to grow trees native to the area. She paid the women for the planting and this lifted a lot of Kenyan women out of poverty.
Also during her time as a lecturer at the university, Maathai campaigned for equal benefits for the women working as the staff of the university, going so far as trying to turn the academic staff association of the university into a union, in order to negotiate for benefits. The courts denied this bid, but many of her demands for equal benefits were later met.
In addition to her work at the University of Nairobi, Maathai was involved in a number of civic organisations. She was a member of the Nairobi branch of the Kenya Red Cross Society, becoming its director in 1973. She was a member of the Kenya Association of University Women. Following the establishment of the Environment Liaison Centre in 1974, Maathai was asked to be a member of the local board, eventually becoming board chair. The Environment Liaison Centre worked to promote the participation of non-governmental organisations in the work of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), whose headquarters was established in Nairobi following the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972. Maathai also joined the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK). Through her work at these various volunteer associations, it became evident to Maathai that the root of most of Kenya’s problems was environmental degradation.
In the summer of 1998, Maathai learned of a government plan to privatise large areas of public land in the Karura Forest, just outside Nairobi, and give it to political supporters. Maathai protested this through letters to the government and the press. She went with the Green Belt Movement to Karura Forest, planting trees and protesting the destruction of the forest. On 8 January 1999, a group of protesters including Maathai, six opposition MPs, journalists, international observers, and Green Belt members and supporters returned to the forest to plant a tree in protest. The entry to the forest was guarded by a large group of men. When she tried to plant a tree in an area that had been designated to be cleared for a golf course, the group was attacked. Many of the protesters were injured, including Maathai, four MPs, some of the journalists, and German environmentalists. When she reported the attack to the police, they refused to return with her to the forest to arrest her attackers. However, the attack had been filmed by Maathai’s supporters, and the event provoked international outrage. Student protests broke out throughout Nairobi, and some of these groups were violently broken up by the police. Protests continued until 16 August 1999, when the president announced that he was banning all allocation of public land.
In 2001, the government again planned to take public forest land and give it to its supporters. While protesting this and collecting petition signatures on 7 March 2001, in Wang’uru village near Mount Kenya, Maathai was again arrested. The following day, following international and popular protest at her arrest, she was released without being charged. On 7 July 2001, shortly after planting trees at Freedom Corner in Uhuru Park in Nairobi to commemorate Saba Saba Day, Maathai was again arrested. Later that evening, she was again released without being charged. In January 2002, Maathai returned to teaching as the Dorothy McCluskey Visiting Fellow for Conservation at the Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. She remained there until June 2002, teaching a course on sustainable development focused on the work of the Green Belt Movement.
Maathai travelled far and wide, won several appointments, awards and recognitions, and even planted a tree with the then United States Senator and President, Barack Obama whose Kenyan father was educated in America through the same program as Maathai. She and the then Senator Obama met and planted a tree together in Uhuru Park in Nairobi.
In 2009, she published “The Challenge for Africa” with her insights into the strengths and weaknesses of governance in Africa, her own experiences, and the centrality of environmental protection to Africa’s future.
Maathai’s Sad end
Maathai went on to serve on the Eminent Advisory Board of the Association of European Parliamentarians with Africa (AWEPA), but died on 25th September 2011 of complications arising from Ovarian Cancer while receiving treatment at a Nairobi hospital.
Her remains were cremated and buried at the Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies in Nairobi, Kenya.
Long Live Wangari Maathai!
Long Live Kenya!!
Long Live Africa!!!
Cited Sources from Wikipedia and Britanica