Background

Born on April 1, 1940, in Nyeri, Kenya, environmental activist Wangari Maathai grew up in a small village. Her father supported the family working as a tenant farmer. At this time, Kenya was still a British colony. Her family was of the Kikuyu ethnic group, the most populous ethnic group in Kenya, and had lived in the area for several generations. Around 1943, Maathai's family relocated to a white-owned farm in the Rift Valley, near the town of Nakuru, where her father had found work.

Education

In 1947, Maathai returned to Ihithe with her mother, as two of her brothers were attending primary school in the village, and there was no schooling available on the farm where her father worked. Her father remained at the farm. Shortly afterward, at the age of eight, she joined her brothers at Ihithe Primary School.

At the age of eleven, Maathai moved to St. Cecilia's Intermediate Primary School, a boarding school at the Mathari Catholic Mission in Nyeri. Maathai studied at St. Cecilia's for four years. During this time, she became fluent in English and converted to Catholicism, taking the Christian name Mary Josephine.

She also was involved with the Christian society known as the Legion of Mary, whose members attempted "to serve God by serving fellow human beings." Studying at St. Cecilia's, Maathai was sheltered from the ongoing Mau Mau Uprising, which forced her mother to move from their homestead to an emergency village in Ihithe. 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 Limuru in Limuru.

After graduating from Loreto-Limuru in 1959, she planned to attend the University of East Africa in Kampala, Uganda. However, the end of the colonial period of East Africa was nearing, and 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 program through the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, initiating what became known as the Kennedy Airlift or Airlift Africa. Maathai became one of about three hundred Kenyans chosen to study at American universities in September 1960.

Maathai received a scholarship to study at Mount St. Scholastica College (now Benedictine College), in Atchison, Kansas. At Mount St. Scholastica, she majored in biology, with minors in chemistry and German. After receiving her bachelor of science degree in 1964, she was accepted to the University of Pittsburgh to study for a master's degree in biology. Her graduate studies at the University of Pittsburgh were funded by the Africa-America Institute.

During her studies in Pittsburgh, Maathai first experienced environmental restoration, as environmentalists in the city pushed to rid the city of air pollution. In January 1966, Maathai completed her studies at the University of Pittsburgh, earning a Master of Science in Biological Sciences, and was appointed to a position as a research assistant to a professor of zoology at University College of Nairobi.

Upon her return to Kenya, Maathai dropped her Christian names, Mary Josephine, preferring to be known by her birth name, Wangari Muta.

In 1967, at the urging of Professor Hofmann, she traveled to the University of Giessen in Germany in pursuit of a doctorate. She studied both at Giessen and the University of Munich.

Career

Concluding her studies, Wangari Maathai returned to Kenya to take up the seat of a research assistant to a professor of zoology at the University College of Nairobi. However, the post was transferred to someone else due to gender and tribal biases.

She finally found work under Professor Reinhold Hofmann in the microanatomy section of the newly established Department of Veterinary Anatomy in the School of Veterinary Medicine at University College of Nairobi. Following continuous persistence from Prof Hoffman, she relocated to Germany in 1967 to pursue a doctorate degree from the University of Giessen and the University of Munich. Two years later, she returned to Nairobi to further continue her studies. She took up the post of the assistant lecturer at the University College of Nairobi.

In 1971, she became the first Eastern African woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in veterinary anatomy. Her thesis work entailed development and differentiation of gonads in bovines Her career graph witnessed an upward drift in the following years, as she first became a senior lecturer in anatomy, later on taking up the chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy and finally becoming an associate professor in 1977. It was while holding on to these significant positions that she fought against gender and tribal biases, strongly raising her voice for equal rights of women.

Other than holding on to her university profile, she worked for various civic organizations, serving as a member of the Kenya Association of University Women, local Environment Liaison Centre, National Council of Women of Kenya and Kenya Red Cross Society of which she was elected as the director in 1973.

It was while working for the non-profit organizations that she realized that the root of the problems in Nairobi was due to environmental degradation. In 1974, her husband won a seat at the Parliament’s Lang'ata constituency.

In an attempt to fulfill her husband’s claim of limiting unemployment in Kenya, she founded Envirocare Ltd. The company not only provided employment but also attended to the idea of environmental restoration. The job required no special skills and involved people to plants trees to save the environment. Envirocare’s first nursery was formulated in the Karura Forest. However, due to financial hitches, the project closed down. Nevertheless, her efforts did not go unnoticed and she was selected to be a part of the first UN conference on human settlements, known as Habitat I, in June 1976

Returning to Nairobi, she promoted her idea of planting trees at the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK). Accepting the idea, the council led a procession on June 5, 1977 planting seven trees. Formerly known as ‘Save the Land Harambee’, it later became popular as Green Belt Movement. The same year, she underwent personal crises following divorce from her husband and the subsequent charges of contempt of court. Her bad phase left her monetarily weak. As a result, she sent her kids to her ex-husband, while she took up a job at the Economic Commission for Africa which involved too much travelling. In 1979, she contested for the position of a chairman at the NCWK. She lost by three votes and was eventually given the seat of vice-chairman. Following year, she won an unopposed election and was chosen as the chairman, a position she retained until 1987. Despite immense financial problems, the organization gained worldwide fame for its environmentally friendly work.

In 1982, she gave up her position at the University of Nairobi to contest for a Parliamentary seat. However, she was ruled ineligible for the same. She eventually found work as a coordinator for the Green Belt Movement, which started to flourish. With greater popularity, the Green Belt Movement expanded throughout Africa and founded the Pan-African Green Belt Network. It transformed to become a separate non-government organization and aimed to combat issues such as desertification, deforestation, water crises, and rural hunger. Towards the latter half of the 1980s, she started pressing for democracy, constitutional reform, and freedom of expression. This did not go down well with the government which forced her to vacate the office. In a series of events that followed, she launched a hunger strike to liberate political prisoners. Though the government did not bow down to the demands initially, they eventually surrendered and the prisoners were freed in 1993.

With an attempt to defeat the ruling party and bring down President Arap Moi from his chair, she twice attempted to unite the opposition, but in vain. As a result, in 1997, she ran for the seat of the president as a candidate of the Liberal Party but lost it.

In 2002, she again stood for the elections, this time as the candidate of the National Rainbow Coalition, which unified the opposition. She finally defeated the ruling party and took on the office of the Assistant Minister in the Ministry for Environment and Natural Resources and served in the capacity from 2003 until 2005. In 2005, she was appointed as the first president of the African Union's Economic, Social, and Cultural Council and was selected as a goodwill ambassador for an initiative aimed at protecting the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem. In 2007, she was defeated in the Party of National Unity's primary elections for its parliamentary candidates. Choosing to run as a candidate of a smaller party, she was later defeated yet again in December 2007 parliamentary elections.

In her Nobel speech, Maathai said that picking her for the renowned peace prize "challenged the world to broaden the understanding of peace: There can be no peace without equitable development, and there can be no development without sustainable management of the environment in a democratic and peaceful space." She also called for the release of fellow activist Aung San Suu Kyi in her talk.

Maathai shared her amazing life story with the world in the 2006 memoir Unbowed. In her final years, she battled ovarian cancer. She died on September 25, 2011, at the age of 71 years old. Maathai was survived by her three children: Waweru, Wanjira, and Muta.

Achievements

• Wangari Maathai was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was also the first female scholar from East and Central Africa to take a doctorate (in biology), and the first female professor ever in her home country of Kenya. Maathai played an active part in the struggle for democracy in Kenya and belonged to the opposition to Daniel Arap Moi's regime.
  
  Wangari Maathai has been listed as a noteworthy Environmentalist, consultant by Marquis Who's Who.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Challenge for Africa

    (In this groundbreaking work, the Nobel Peace Prize-winner...)

    2009
  • Replenishing the Earth: Spiritual Values for Healing Ourselves and the World

    (An impassioned call to heal the wounds of our planet and ...)

    2010
  • Unbowed: A Memoir

    (In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts h...)

    2007

Religion

Wangari Maathai was converted to Catholicism, taking the Christian name Mary Josephine. She said:

"I don't really know why I care so much. I just have something inside me that tells me that there is a problem, and I have got to do something about it. I think that is what I would call the God in me."

Politics

Professor Maathai was active in the National Council of Women of Kenya (1976-1987) and was its chairman (1981-1987). In 1976, while she was serving in the National Council of Women, Professor Maathai introduced the idea of community-based tree planting. She continued to develop this idea into a broad-based grassroots organization, the Green Belt Movement (GBM), whose main focus is poverty reduction and environmental conservation through tree planting.

Professor Maathai represented the Tetu constituency in Kenya’s parliament (2002-2007) and served as Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources in Kenya’s ninth parliament (2003-2007). In 2005, she was appointed Goodwill Ambassador to the Congo Basin Forest Ecosystem by the eleven Heads of State in the Congo region. The following year, 2006, she founded the Nobel Women’s Initiative with her sister laureates Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Betty Williams, and Mairead Corrigan. In 2007, Professor Maathai was invited to be co-chair of the Congo Basin Fund, an initiative by the British and the Norwegian governments to help protect the Congo forests.

Views

Maathai's environmental activism was part of a holistic approach to empowering women, advocating for democracy, and protecting the earth.

Wangari Maathai was Kenya's foremost environmentalist and women's rights advocate. She contended that women have a unique connection to the environment and that human rights violations against women exacerbate environmental degradation.

Maathai founded the "Green Belt Movement." On Earth Day, 1977, she launched a one-woman campaign to reforest Kenya. She hoped to help stop soil erosion and to provide a source of lumber for homes and firewood for cooking. She distributed seedlings to rural women and set up an incentive system for each seedling that survived.

She encouraged farmers, 70 percent of them women, to plant protective "green belts" to stop soil erosion, provide shade, and become a source of timber and fuel.

The Green Belt Movement has planted more than 30 million trees in Africa, helping 900,000 women. The Green Belt Movement has spread throughout the world, from Africa to the United States, to Haiti, and beyond.

Quotations: "African women, in general, need to know that it's OK for them to be the way they are - to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence."

"We owe it to ourselves and to the next generation to conserve the environment so that we can bequeath our children a sustainable world that benefits all."

"I know there is pain when sawmills close and people lose jobs, but we have to make a choice. We need water and we need these forests."

"I am working to make sure we don't only protect the environment, we also improve governance."

"It is important to nurture any new ideas and initiatives which can make a difference for Africa."

"Some say that AIDS came from the monkeys, and I doubt that because we have been living with monkeys from time immemorial, others say it was a curse from God, but I say it cannot be that."

"Women are responsible for their children, they cannot sit back, waste time and see them starve."

"We need to promote development that does not destroy our environment."

"We are very fond of blaming the poor for destroying the environment. But often it is powerful, including governments, that are responsible."

"It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men."

Membership

Wangari Maathai was a member of the Board of directors of Kenya Red Cross Society, 1973-1977. She was also a member of Chairman Environmental Liaison Center International, Kenya, 1974-1984, National Council of Women, 1977-1987. She is also was a member of Active Friends of Kenyatta National Hospital, Kenya, 1975.

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  Board of directors (1973-1977)

  Red Cross Society , Kenya

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  Chairman (1974-1984)

  Environmental Liaison Center International , Kenya

• 

  Active Friends of Kenyatta National Hospital , Kenya

  1975

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  National Council of Women

  1977 - 1987

Personality

Wangari Maathai was a mighty woman, creative, fearless and full of love.

Quotes from others about the person

• Former U.S. vice president and fellow environmentalist Al Gore was among those who offered remembrances of Maathai. "Wangari overcame incredible obstacles to devote her life to service - service to her children, to her constituents, to the women, and indeed all the people of Kenya - and to the world as a whole,'' according to The New York Times. She remains a potent example of how one person can be a force for change. As Maathai once wrote in her memoir, "What people see as fearlessness is really persistence."

Interests

• biology, nature, feminism

Connections

In April 1966, Wangari met Mwangi Mathai, another Kenyan who had studied in America, who would later become her husband. She has a daughter, Wanjira, who was born in December 1971.

Daughter:

Wanjira Mathai

ex-spouse:

Mwangi Mathai

colleague:

Helvi Sipilä

References

• Mama Miti: Wangari Maathai and the Trees of Kenya
  2010
• Wangari's Trees of Peace: A True Story from Africa
  2018
• Planting the Trees of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai
  2008
• Environmental Activist Wangari Maathai
  2018