Dr. Wangari Maathai
Who's that? They whispered when she got the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. Dr. Wangari Maathai. Isn't she a veterinarian at the University of Nairobi, Kenya or something? She plants trees. She organized some protest about a statue of the dictator in the city park. The old women took their clothes off to shame the young men who were beating them up. She's an environmentalist. What's an environmentalist doing with the Nobel Peace Prize? She's one of those mad divorcees.
Wangari Maathai was born in Kenya, and got the opportunity to go to school as a child - a rare opportunity for a girl. From there went to college in the United States during the 60's. When she returned to Kenya a few years later, she discovered that in place of colonialism, a tyrant named Daniel arap Moi had the country in his fist - and the people were still miserable. What's the environment got to do with peace?
"In the seventies," Dr. Wangari Maathai says in her memoir, Unbowed, "I was a member of the National Council of Women of Kenya. One of the researchers presented the results of a study she had done which found that children in the central region of Kenya were suffering from diseases associated with malnutrition. This was an eye-opener for me, since that is where I come from and I knew from personal experience that the central region was one of the most fertile in Kenya."
She goes on: "Many farmers had converted practically all of their land into growing coffee and tea to sell in the international market. These "cash crops" were occupying land previously used to produce food for people to eat." Women started feeding their families processed foods like white bread and rice; in other words, foods high in carbohydrates, but low in nutrients...
"These facts troubled me," she says, "not least because they seemed so contrary to my experiences as a child - when there was more than enough food, the food itself was nutritious and wholesome, people were healthy and strong, and there was always enough firewood to cook with.
Prof Maathai listened to poor, rural women talk about their circumstances, and saw the environmental cause behind their suffering.
"The majority of our members were poor, rural women," Wangari Maathai writes. "We worried about their access to clean water and firewood, how they would feed their children, pay their school fees, and afford clothing - and we wondered what we could do to ease their burdens.We could either sit in an ivory tower wondering how so many people could be so poor and not be working to change their situation, or we could try to help them escape the vicious cycle they found themselves in. This was not a remote problem for us. The rural areas were where our mothers and sisters still lived. We owed it to them to do all we could. 
Now, it is one thing to understand the issues. It is quite another to do something about them. But I have always been interested in finding solutions....to think of what can be done rather than worrying about what cannot.I have never been interested in what is not possible. I didn't sit down and ask myself, "Now, let me see; what shall I do?" It just came to me: "Why not plant trees?" Wangari Maathai on the campaign trail with her husband, MwangiWangari Maathai talks in her memoir about her husband's decision to run for Parliament in 1974. "I supported this decision and worked very hard to make sure that he won. This was a tall order since I was still working full time at the university and we now had three children, including a newborn, Muta. Nevertheless, we worked together and separately on the campaign trail, visiting people and talking to them....we were a young and highly educated couple, and I could see how much hope people were investing in us.
Mwangi promised that he would create more employment for people if they voted for him. This worried me a lot," she writes. "When I make a promise, I expect to keep it, and if I cannot deliver something, then I do not promise that I will."After he was elected, she reminded him of his promises. "What are you going to do with all the people you promised the jobs to?" I asked. "That was the campaign," he replied. "Now we are in Parliament." "Mwangi told me not to worry," she remembers, "but I did. I refused to accept that we should break our promises so easily." On Earth Day in 1977, she founded the Green Belt Movement.
The Green Belt Movement, founded on Earth Day in 1977, was on the surface a source of meager employment for the poorest rural women in Kenya. The organization would pay about 10 cents for each seedling planted that looked like it would make it. Not much, right? But it was a little source of independence for a woman in a country that didn't have much use for independent women. It was a trickle of hope.
It reminded the women of their abilities, too. The foresters that supplied the seedlings quickly ran out of them, and Wangari Maathai suggested they harvest and grow their own. "Just use your woman sense," she said to the women when they balked. Dr. Maathai had grown up working the land with her hands, planting and harvesting; and she knew these women had grown up the same way, and they already had all the skills they needed to plant trees, no matter what the men said. They became her "foresters without diplomas". 
Dr. Wangari Maathai says, though, that the purpose of the Green Belt Movement is really education. If people don't know what's going on, they are easy to manipulate. In her seminars, she compares it to getting on the wrong bus because you can't read the signs - which leads to all kinds of trouble!Beginning with the environment and local women, she's led a grassroots political movement which has helped restore democracy in Kenya. And you'll still find her planting trees; ) Have YOU found your "tree" yet?
Go from Wangari Maathai to the Green Belt Movement website
|
