ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST KENYATrees are living symbols of peace and hope.
—WANGARI MAATHAI
Wangari’s eyes opened wide and she craned her head back so far, she worried she might fall over . . . or get knocked down by the rushing crowd. She was in New York City! Cars and taxis beeped their horns, street vendors hollered, glass and metal skyscrapers soared up into the sky. To young Wangari, they looked as if they were swaying in the wind and touching the clouds. It made her dizzy. Back in her African village, Ihithe, the only thing that scraped the clouds was Mount Kenya!
The Big Apple is pretty amazing to most first-time visitors, but for young Wangari Maathai, it was life changing. She had never before been out of Africa. Never been to a big city. Never been on an airplane! As the top student in her high school, she had been chosen by her teachers for an amazing opportunity: Senator John F. Kennedy (soon to be president of the United States) had offered scholarships to three hundred Kenyan students to travel to America and go to college. In Kenya, few girls attended school at all. And here she was going to college. In America! She could hardly believe it.
But that was just the beginning. This girl from a tiny village in Kenya would grow up to be an environmental leader, would start a political movement across Africa, and would one day win the Nobel Peace Prize!
In 1940, Wangari was born in a traditional mud-walled house with no electricity, running water, or indoor bathroom. She was the oldest of five siblings and a part of the Kikuyu tribe. Back then, Kenya was ruled as a colony by the United Kingdom. White, British colonists owned the land and businesses. The Africans, like Wangari’s family, merely worked for the white people on their land for very little money, if any. Her father was a driver for a white landowner, and her mother took care of Wangari’s house and the family.
When Wangari was a young girl, her mother gave her a small plot of land to grow a garden of her own. Wangari planted sweet potatoes, beans, maize, and millet (a seeded grass used as grain or cereal). This garden is where she first learned how to dig and plant and tend the earth—skills that would serve her well later in life.
Wangari always felt a special connection to the nature around her. “When my mother would send me to fetch water,” Wangari writes, “I would get lost in this fascinating world of nature until she would call out, ‘What are you doing under the arrowroots? Bring the water!’ ”1 She noticed the streams and plants and trees around her; she noticed the frogs and birds and insects that lived there. And she thought about the larger animals—the elephants and monkeys and leopards—that she couldn’t see but knew were living deeper in the forests. Young Wangari noticed how the land and plants and animals were all connected—without one, the others could not survive. Her mother always told her, “A tree is worth more than its wood.”2 This was wisdom she never forgot.
Wangari’s younger brothers went to school, but it was very unusual at that time for Kenyan girls to get any education. Girls did women’s work with their mothers until they were old enough to marry, and then they did it for their husbands. But Wangari got lucky. One day, her younger brother asked, “How come Wangari doesn’t go to school like the rest of us?” Her mother answered, “There’s no reason why not.”3 And so, eight-year-old Wangari started school.
The Green Belt Movement made lasting change in Africa, planting more than 30 million trees and giving jobs to almost a million women. The movement also inspired similar movements in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.5
She was a quick learner. First, she went to her village school, but at eleven, she left her family to move to a Catholic boarding school in a nearby village. In 1959, Wangari graduated from high school at the top of her class and a few months later was one of three hundred Kenyan students chosen for a scholarship to go to an American college.4 For four years, Wangari studied science at Mount Saint Scholastica College in Kansas. She loved learning about the life cycles and ecosystems she had so carefully observed as a young girl.
The experience wasn’t perfect, however. Wangari had witnessed racism in Kenya in the way the colonial white people treated their black workers and neighbors, but she didn’t expect it in the United States. She was shocked to see signs forbidding black Americans from using the same bathrooms, restaurants, and stores as whites, or signs segregating blacks into their own section of these public spaces. She realized that even though the countries were different in many ways, in this way, they weren’t so different. In America, the civil rights movement was under way, with black Americans fighting for equal rights. In Kenya, her people were fighting to gain independence from Britain, which they did in 1963.
Wangari earned a degree in biology and then returned to Kenya and got a job as the assistant to the director of the veterinary anatomy department at the University of Nairobi. In 1969, she married and had three children but also continued her career. Two years later, she became the first East African woman to earn her PhD; a few years after that, she was promoted to assistant professor and then director of the veterinary anatomy department.
The people of Kenya call Wangari Mama Miti, meaning “Mother of Trees.”
During this busy time in her life, Wangari noticed a change in Kenya. When she was younger, the white colonists were the ones cutting down the forests, but now it was her own people cutting trees to sell. They were also making room for profitable crops like tea, coffee, and tobacco to sell to rich countries. The forests of Kenya were disappearing, and as a result, wild animals were losing their habitats. Rivers were muddy because there were no trees left to hold back the dirt when it rained. Women were having trouble feeding their families because plantations for export crops replaced food-growing farms.
Wangari knew she had to do something, but what? In 1977, inspiration struck:
It just came to me: “Why not plant trees?” . . . The trees would offer shade for humans and animals, protect watersheds and bind the soil, and, if they were fruit trees, provide food. They would also heal the land by bringing back birds and small animals . . .6
Wangari traveled from village to village, explaining the importance of trees and asking people to think of the future, not just the present. She created tree nurseries across Kenya, putting local women in charge of replanting trees in their area. Her effort evolved into the Green Belt Movement.
Wangari and her Green Belt Movement protested the Kenyan government and its environmental policies. She was not popular with the men in charge, who didn’t like being challenged by a woman. They threw her in jail. They beat her. They threatened to kill her. But Wangari never gave up. She organized her own party, she ran for office, and she protested. When president/dictator Daniel arap Moi planned to build a sixty-story skyscraper inside Nairobi’s Uhuru Park, Wangari organized a huge demonstration, and the government gave up the project. Every time the government tried to mess with the environment, Wangari was there, fighting.
When Moi finally lost power in 2002 (after being “president” for twenty-four years!), Wangari ran for office and won a seat in Parliament. In 2003, the new president appointed her minister of the Environment, Natural Resources, and Wildlife. A year later, she was awarded the world’s most prestigious honor, the Nobel Peace Prize, “for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace.”7 She was the first African woman to receive it.
Although she died in 2011, Wangari’s dream lives on in Africa. Today, thanks to her work, there are way more trees in Kenya than when she started. Wangari’s Green Belt Movement has succeeded in planting more than fifty-one million trees since she founded it in 1977!8 And thanks to her fighting, protesting, and organizing, Kenya is now a free democracy. Her political organization is still protecting and planting and building a better future for Africa.