Wangari Maathai signing books after speaking in the Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York City, March 8, 2005. Photo by Juliana Thomas.
She’s survived jail, beatings, and endless death threats to help topple a tyrant, save Kenya’s forests, and bring hope to countless women and children. Judith Stone spends two awed and inspired days in the radiant presence of the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, Wangari Maathai.
As Wangari Maathai makes her way through the crowded halls of the United Nations headquarters in New York City, she causes a stir of rock-star proportions. The first African woman—and first environmentalist—to win the Nobel Peace Prize, she’s come to take part in the UN Commission on the Status of Women, a gathering of more than 1,800 representatives from 165 countries. When women spot Maathai, they surround her, offering congratulations, bursting into cries of celebratory ululation, asking to snap a picture with her. It’s tough for Maathaui, 65, to get from one meeting, lecture, or panel to another because she stops every two feet to embrace supporters. She’s a notoriously terrific hugger “So good,” says her daughter, Wanjira, 33, who works with her mother, “that we once auctioned off one of her hugs to raise money for the Green Belt Movement.”
That’s the organization Maathai launched in 1977, rallying poor, rural women to plant millions of trees to reverse the rampant deforestation of Kenya by a corrupt government. The women acquired not only desperately needed fuel, food, shelter, and income—the Green Belt Movement (GBM) pays a small fee for every seedling that flourishes—but a sense of their own untapped power. Other African nations followed Maathai’s model. In nearly three decades, the GBM has planted more than 30 million trees and provided jobs for over 100,000 people, most of them women.
Along the way, through peaceful protests that captured world attention, the GBM opposed the despotic regime of Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s president from 1978 to 2002. Maathai was arrested, tear-gassed, clubbed senseless, whipped bloody, plagued by anonymous death threats, divorced by her husband for being, he declared, too educated and too hard to control, and denounced by Moi as a “threat to the order and security of the country.” He was slightly off the mark. Maathai was very good for the order and security of the country, just very bad for him. Trees helped topple a dictator.
Robust and regal, Maathai mounts the podium at the UN. Her voice is deep and husbky, like a clear stream over mossy stones. “Don’t say it was Wangari Maathai who won the award,” she tells the women standing to cheer her. “I am a symbol of all of us.” She flashes a smile so compelling it deserves some sort of prize all its own. “In honoring me, the Nobel Committee was urging us to see the link between peace and a well-managed environment.”
Giving the award to an environmentalist was controversial; one Norwegian politician complained that the committee should have focused on disarmament. Maathai believes they did. “When we have conflict, quite often it’s because we’re fighting over resources: who will control them, who will have access, who will take a greater share,” she tells a gathering of dignitaries and environmental activists later in the day. The scarcer the resources—water, land, oil, trees, minerals—the greater the acrimony, she says.
In the two days I watch Maathai gracefully navigate a killer schedule, she covers an astonishing range of subjects, including the marginalization of women (“For the last 30 years, governments have called the environment and women’s rights ‘emerging issues.’ How can that be when 70 percent of the world’s poorest people are women, and 50 percent of them depend for their subsistence on the use of natural resources?”). She fields a question about a troubling misrepresentation: She was famously misquoted in a Kenyan newspaper as saying that AIDS was a plot by white scientists to wipe out Africans, when in fact she had been debunking that destructive myth. She argues eloquently and persuasively for the cancellation of Third World debt—and she finds time to revel in the memory of rocking out with Patti LaBelle, whom she chose to perform at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert last December. “Oh! I was carrying on!” she says. “I was dying laughing. I love her music.”
Late in the afternoon, Maathai is grabbing a bite after her third address of the day (the fourth if you count a live CNN interview) when she’s greeted by her old friend Beverly Miller, an official with the UN Environment Programme. “Usually when I see you, you’re digging!” Miller says. “The dirt is where your success lies.”
Maathai’s parents taught her to respect the soil and its bounty, and to love planting trees, she says. The daughter of a subsistence farmer, she was born in the green, clean central highlands in the foothills of towering Mount Kenya. “I grew up close to my mother, in the field, where I could observe nature. Whatever she did, I did—the traditional women’s tasks, fetching water and gathering firewood.”
Maathai’s oldest brother convinced their parents to send her to school when she was 7, unusual in a culture that didn’t value educating women. She excelled and, in 1960, earned a scholarship to study in the United States. At Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas—“That’s where I got my Kansas accent,” she jokes in the pleasingly musical inflections of East Africa—Maathai, known to her classmates as Mary Jo, was delighted by the novelty of falling leaves and snowstorms. Returning to Kenya, she became a professor of veterinary anatomy and the first woman at the University of Nairobi to chair a department. She also married Mwangi Mathai, who was a member of parliament, and had three children.
Maathai was shocked at the way her homeland had changed during her years away. The stream where she’d drawn drinking water had dried up. The forests where she’d gathered firewood had been razed for timber, cleared for commercial farming, or replaced by fast-growing exotic trees that sucked nutrients from the soil. Rich land was turning to desert.
“I listened to women saying that deforestation was forcing them to walk farther and farther to find firewood for cooking, that they couldn’t grow enough on depleted soil to feed their families, that they had no money to buy food,” she says. Trees, she thought, might solve all three problems. With support form the National Council of Women in Kenya, small groups of women gathered seeds and planted them. “Eventually, the movement became so powerful that the government saw the need to ban it,” Maathai says with a laugh.
That happened after the GBM began advocating democracy and fighting corruption. Throughout the 1990s, Maathai was arrested again and again for opposing Moi; at times she had to wear disguises and sleep in safe houses. When she was (legally) planting trees to replace a forest being (illegally) cut and replaced by luxury housing, security guards whipped her on the head. She signed the police report in her own blood. While she was holding vigil with mothers protesting the imprisonment of their sons—prodemocracy activists—riot police clubbed Maathai unconscious, and she woke up in a hospital. She spent International Women’s Day 2001 in jail for challenging the government’s wrongdoings.
“Prison humbles you because it’s deliberately humiliating,” she says. “But you get out of there ready to fight your battle till the end. If I had never gone to prison, maybe I would not have been as persistent, as patient as I became.”
Since Moi’s party’s defeat in free elections in 2002, Maathai herself has entered Kenya’s government. She now serves as assistant minister for environment and natural resources—and shows no signs of slowing down her activism. The GBM has taken on AIDS education, for example, especially dispelling myths and teaching women to protect themselves; Maathai is also working to save the threatened rainforest of the Congo basin—“one of the world’s lungs,” she calls it.
“People often ask me what drives me,” she says to me. “Perhaps the more difficult question would be: What would it take to stop me? I’m driven by opportunities to confront the problems before me eyes.”
Several times during her stay in New York, Maathai recounts a parable she heard on a recent trip to Japan; she retells it with panache. “A big fire was destroying the forest. All the animals fled, except the hummingbird. It flew to the river, picked up one drop of water in its tiny beak, flew back, and poured that drop on the fire. Again and again it returned to the river, each time scooping up a single drop and pouring it on the fire. The other animals watched from the far shore, laughing and mocking. The harder they laughed, the harder the hummingbird worked. ‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’ the animals asked. Without stopping her work, she answered calmly, ‘I’m doing what I can.’ That’s all any of us can do: what we can,” Maathai says.
Two days after her UN visit, Maathai gives the Sunday sermon at the White Plains Presbyterian Church just north of New York City. “I’ve never met a human being so aligned with the courage of her convictions,” says Reverend C. Carter Via, turning over his pulpit to Maathai, with whom he volunteered in Kenya. She speaks movingly about her commitment to taking responsibility for all the planet’s species—“those I understand and those I don’t understand, those I can use and those I have no use for.”
After the service, Maathai, her daughter, Wanjira, her son Muta, 31, and friends chat through a long lunch. “When I was little, I don’t think I understood what Mum did,” Muta says. “I was more interested in what she would bring us from her travels. But when I started working with the Green Belt Movement and got my hands dirty, that’s when it all made sense. Once you begin to care, it never ends. You’re always asking, What can I do to fix the problem? You’re made uncomfortable by the fact that someone else is suffering.”
It was the second perfect distillation of his mother’s philosophy that day. The first had occurred near the end of the church service when a tiny, dormant tree, to be planted later in Maathai’s honor, was brought to the altar for blessing. Children on the altar giggled at its scrawniness, but Maathai saw its future. “Where I come from, trees don’t go to sleep in winter and wake up iwith enthusiasm in the spring!” she told them. “It doesn’t look like much now, but it will give us leaves and shade. On this tree will come insects, birds, and squirrels,” she said. “It will become a home. It will improve our home: Trees take the carbon dioxide we breathe out, embrace it, and turn it into oxygen and energy. Without trees, we would die off.” Then she addressed the sapling directly. “Keep tree!”
That’s the organization Maathai launched in 1977, rallying poor, rural women to plant millions of trees to reverse the rampant deforestation of Kenya by a corrupt government. The women acquired not only desperately needed fuel, food, shelter, and income—the Green Belt Movement (GBM) pays a small fee for every seedling that flourishes—but a sense of their own untapped power. Other African nations followed Maathai’s model. In nearly three decades, the GBM has planted more than 30 million trees and provided jobs for over 100,000 people, most of them women.
Along the way, through peaceful protests that captured world attention, the GBM opposed the despotic regime of Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s president from 1978 to 2002. Maathai was arrested, tear-gassed, clubbed senseless, whipped bloody, plagued by anonymous death threats, divorced by her husband for being, he declared, too educated and too hard to control, and denounced by Moi as a “threat to the order and security of the country.” He was slightly off the mark. Maathai was very good for the order and security of the country, just very bad for him. Trees helped topple a dictator.
Robust and regal, Maathai mounts the podium at the UN. Her voice is deep and husbky, like a clear stream over mossy stones. “Don’t say it was Wangari Maathai who won the award,” she tells the women standing to cheer her. “I am a symbol of all of us.” She flashes a smile so compelling it deserves some sort of prize all its own. “In honoring me, the Nobel Committee was urging us to see the link between peace and a well-managed environment.”
Giving the award to an environmentalist was controversial; one Norwegian politician complained that the committee should have focused on disarmament. Maathai believes they did. “When we have conflict, quite often it’s because we’re fighting over resources: who will control them, who will have access, who will take a greater share,” she tells a gathering of dignitaries and environmental activists later in the day. The scarcer the resources—water, land, oil, trees, minerals—the greater the acrimony, she says.
In the two days I watch Maathai gracefully navigate a killer schedule, she covers an astonishing range of subjects, including the marginalization of women (“For the last 30 years, governments have called the environment and women’s rights ‘emerging issues.’ How can that be when 70 percent of the world’s poorest people are women, and 50 percent of them depend for their subsistence on the use of natural resources?”). She fields a question about a troubling misrepresentation: She was famously misquoted in a Kenyan newspaper as saying that AIDS was a plot by white scientists to wipe out Africans, when in fact she had been debunking that destructive myth. She argues eloquently and persuasively for the cancellation of Third World debt—and she finds time to revel in the memory of rocking out with Patti LaBelle, whom she chose to perform at the Nobel Peace Prize Concert last December. “Oh! I was carrying on!” she says. “I was dying laughing. I love her music.”
Late in the afternoon, Maathai is grabbing a bite after her third address of the day (the fourth if you count a live CNN interview) when she’s greeted by her old friend Beverly Miller, an official with the UN Environment Programme. “Usually when I see you, you’re digging!” Miller says. “The dirt is where your success lies.”
Maathai’s parents taught her to respect the soil and its bounty, and to love planting trees, she says. The daughter of a subsistence farmer, she was born in the green, clean central highlands in the foothills of towering Mount Kenya. “I grew up close to my mother, in the field, where I could observe nature. Whatever she did, I did—the traditional women’s tasks, fetching water and gathering firewood.”
Maathai’s oldest brother convinced their parents to send her to school when she was 7, unusual in a culture that didn’t value educating women. She excelled and, in 1960, earned a scholarship to study in the United States. At Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas—“That’s where I got my Kansas accent,” she jokes in the pleasingly musical inflections of East Africa—Maathai, known to her classmates as Mary Jo, was delighted by the novelty of falling leaves and snowstorms. Returning to Kenya, she became a professor of veterinary anatomy and the first woman at the University of Nairobi to chair a department. She also married Mwangi Mathai, who was a member of parliament, and had three children.
Maathai was shocked at the way her homeland had changed during her years away. The stream where she’d drawn drinking water had dried up. The forests where she’d gathered firewood had been razed for timber, cleared for commercial farming, or replaced by fast-growing exotic trees that sucked nutrients from the soil. Rich land was turning to desert.
“I listened to women saying that deforestation was forcing them to walk farther and farther to find firewood for cooking, that they couldn’t grow enough on depleted soil to feed their families, that they had no money to buy food,” she says. Trees, she thought, might solve all three problems. With support form the National Council of Women in Kenya, small groups of women gathered seeds and planted them. “Eventually, the movement became so powerful that the government saw the need to ban it,” Maathai says with a laugh.
That happened after the GBM began advocating democracy and fighting corruption. Throughout the 1990s, Maathai was arrested again and again for opposing Moi; at times she had to wear disguises and sleep in safe houses. When she was (legally) planting trees to replace a forest being (illegally) cut and replaced by luxury housing, security guards whipped her on the head. She signed the police report in her own blood. While she was holding vigil with mothers protesting the imprisonment of their sons—prodemocracy activists—riot police clubbed Maathai unconscious, and she woke up in a hospital. She spent International Women’s Day 2001 in jail for challenging the government’s wrongdoings.
“Prison humbles you because it’s deliberately humiliating,” she says. “But you get out of there ready to fight your battle till the end. If I had never gone to prison, maybe I would not have been as persistent, as patient as I became.”
Since Moi’s party’s defeat in free elections in 2002, Maathai herself has entered Kenya’s government. She now serves as assistant minister for environment and natural resources—and shows no signs of slowing down her activism. The GBM has taken on AIDS education, for example, especially dispelling myths and teaching women to protect themselves; Maathai is also working to save the threatened rainforest of the Congo basin—“one of the world’s lungs,” she calls it.
“People often ask me what drives me,” she says to me. “Perhaps the more difficult question would be: What would it take to stop me? I’m driven by opportunities to confront the problems before me eyes.”
Several times during her stay in New York, Maathai recounts a parable she heard on a recent trip to Japan; she retells it with panache. “A big fire was destroying the forest. All the animals fled, except the hummingbird. It flew to the river, picked up one drop of water in its tiny beak, flew back, and poured that drop on the fire. Again and again it returned to the river, each time scooping up a single drop and pouring it on the fire. The other animals watched from the far shore, laughing and mocking. The harder they laughed, the harder the hummingbird worked. ‘Just what do you think you’re doing?’ the animals asked. Without stopping her work, she answered calmly, ‘I’m doing what I can.’ That’s all any of us can do: what we can,” Maathai says.
Two days after her UN visit, Maathai gives the Sunday sermon at the White Plains Presbyterian Church just north of New York City. “I’ve never met a human being so aligned with the courage of her convictions,” says Reverend C. Carter Via, turning over his pulpit to Maathai, with whom he volunteered in Kenya. She speaks movingly about her commitment to taking responsibility for all the planet’s species—“those I understand and those I don’t understand, those I can use and those I have no use for.”
After the service, Maathai, her daughter, Wanjira, her son Muta, 31, and friends chat through a long lunch. “When I was little, I don’t think I understood what Mum did,” Muta says. “I was more interested in what she would bring us from her travels. But when I started working with the Green Belt Movement and got my hands dirty, that’s when it all made sense. Once you begin to care, it never ends. You’re always asking, What can I do to fix the problem? You’re made uncomfortable by the fact that someone else is suffering.”
It was the second perfect distillation of his mother’s philosophy that day. The first had occurred near the end of the church service when a tiny, dormant tree, to be planted later in Maathai’s honor, was brought to the altar for blessing. Children on the altar giggled at its scrawniness, but Maathai saw its future. “Where I come from, trees don’t go to sleep in winter and wake up iwith enthusiasm in the spring!” she told them. “It doesn’t look like much now, but it will give us leaves and shade. On this tree will come insects, birds, and squirrels,” she said. “It will become a home. It will improve our home: Trees take the carbon dioxide we breathe out, embrace it, and turn it into oxygen and energy. Without trees, we would die off.” Then she addressed the sapling directly. “Keep tree!”