Obituary: Wangari Maathai

We recently lost Ray Anderson and wrote about his contributions.

A couple of days ago we lost another hero of sustainability, not known too well in North America: Wangari Maathai.

Here is a composite of her amazing life, assembled from bits and pieces of stories from Time Magazine, The Guardian, and other sources.  Be prepared to be amazed (and a little saddened by virtue of losing her).

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 I would not tell stories, because they have been replaced by radio, books and TV,” she said.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.

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 said.

In her memoir Unbowed, Maathai recalls her early childhood in the shadow of Mount Kenya. “At the time of my birth, the land around Ihithe was still lush, green and fertile,” she writes. “The seasons were so regular that you could almost predict that the long, monsoon rains would start falling in mid-March. In July you knew it would be so foggy you would not be able to see 10 feet in front of you, and so cold in the morning that the grass would be silvery-white with frost.”

Decades on, Maathai, the first woman in East Africa to earn a Ph.D., began noticing that the seasons were becoming less dependable and that her country’s vegetation was fast disappearing. A population explosion and years of corrupt government were imperiling not just Kenyan society but the land itself. In the late 1970s, Maathai and other women founded a small environmental group called the Green Belt Movement and encouraged people to plant trees — more than 40 million so far — to prevent soil erosion and provide firewood for cooking. They also took on the most powerful man in Kenya then: President Daniel arap Moi, whose ruling party wanted to build an outsized office tower in a park in the capital, Nairobi. Few people gave Maathai much hope of making a difference. But her folksy charm belies a steely resolve, and her group’s protests eventually forced the government to drop its plans.

She is survived by two daughters, Wanjira and Muta, and a son, Waweru, as well as her granddaughter, Ruth.

Just as project managers – by definition – make a difference, you can see what one person can do with persistence and dedication.