Maathai, Wangari

Wangari Maathai, a professor of biology at Nairobi University in Kenya, could simply enjoy the prestige and security of being a highly educated, well-paid woman in a country where most women lead far different lives. Instead, she founded a movement that has set out to transform those women’s lives and the entire economy of her nation. This is clearly a positive mission, but it has put Maathai in great personal danger.

Her Green Belt Movement has enlisted over 80,000 rural women in planting and tending over 20 million trees. Everywhere that the movement is strong, the villages and the countryside are green with gracious trees that give bananas, mangoes, and papayas to people who remember starvation and malnutrition. The people in these areas see that their own local women have brought about this transformation to health, beauty and economic independence. But to the one-party government of strongman Daniel Arap Moi, such independence is “subversive.”

President Moi has blamed Maathai for giving so many people the idea that they can take charge of their own lives; he has had her imprisoned repeatedly for defying his dictatorship, but she will not be silenced.

Working in the city as well as the countryside, she organized demonstrations to stop the building of a skyscraper in Nairobi’s only park. Moi put her in jail again, but the people’s protest and her letters to the building’s financiers caused them to withdraw from the project.

The city of Nairobi still has a people’s park. And in the country, the women of the Green Belt tend their trees, feed their families, and walk tall—like Wangari Maathai.