Wangari Maathai
1940 – 2011 · Kenya
Known for: Founder of the Green Belt Movement and first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize
“She answered despair by planting a tree, and then another.”
Biography
Wangari Maathai was born on 1 April 1940 in Ihithe, a village in the central highlands of what was then the British colony of Kenya, into a Kikuyu family that had farmed the district for generations. She began school at eight, boarded at the St Cecilia's mission school in Nyeri and finished first in her class in 1956, which took her to Loreto High School in Limuru. In 1960, as colonial rule was ending, she was one of some three hundred Kenyans chosen for the airlift programme funded through the Kennedy foundation, and left for Kansas to study biology at Mount St Scholastica College. A master's degree at the University of Pittsburgh followed in 1966, then further study in Giessen and Munich. In 1971 she became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate, in veterinary anatomy, at the university in Nairobi.
Teaching in Nairobi, she was the first woman there to lead a department and to hold a professorship, and she campaigned for the women on the staff to receive the same benefits as the men. Work with the National Council of Women of Kenya took her into the countryside, where she heard the same complaints repeated: streams drying up, firewood scarce, soil washing off the hillsides, less and less food. Her answer, begun in 1977, was the Green Belt Movement, which paid rural women a small sum for every seedling they raised and kept alive. Over the following decades its members planted tens of millions of trees across Kenya, and the groups became schools of organisation as much as of forestry. Under President Moi she extended the same argument to public land, opposing a tower block planned for Nairobi's Uhuru Park and the parcelling out of the Karura forest, and she was arrested, beaten and vilified for it.
Kenya's political opening brought her into government: she was elected to parliament in 2002 and served as assistant minister for environment and natural resources from 2003 to 2005. In 2004 the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave her the Peace Prize, the first awarded to an African woman, for tying the care of land to democracy and peace, a connection that had sounded eccentric when she first made it. She wrote several books, among them an account of her own life, and carried the case for African forests to international meetings. She died in Nairobi on 25 September 2011 of complications of ovarian cancer, at the age of seventy one. The Green Belt Movement went on without her, and planting trees had become, in Kenya, an ordinary civic act.