Historical Figure
Wangari Maathai
1940–2011
Kenyan environmental activist (1940–2011)
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"WINGS Interview: Africa and Environment" — 1991
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Biography
Wangarĩ Maathai was a Kenyan social, environmental, and political activist who founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on planting trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights. In 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
Timeline
The story of Wangari Maathai, told in moments.
Earned a master's degree from the University of Pittsburgh after arriving in the U.S. through the Kennedy Airlift program. Later became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a Ph.D., from the University of Nairobi.
Founded the Green Belt Movement. Paid rural women a small stipend to plant trees. The idea was simple. Over 51 million trees were planted across Kenya. The movement spread to other African countries.
Went on a hunger strike in Uhuru Park to demand the release of political prisoners. Police beat the protesters with clubs. She was hospitalized. International pressure forced President Moi to release the prisoners.
Won the Nobel Peace Prize. First African woman to receive it. The committee cited her "contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace." She'd been beaten, jailed, and tear-gassed over three decades of activism.
Died of ovarian cancer in Nairobi at 71. Kenya declared a day of mourning. The trees she planted are still growing.
In Their Own Words (8)
"Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven't done a thing. You are just talking."
Speech at Goldman Awards, San Francisco (24 April 2006), 2006
"As I conclude I reflect on my childhood experience when I would visit a stream next to our home to fetch water for my mother. I would drink water straight from the stream. Playing among the arrowroot leaves I tried in vain to pick up the strands of frogs’ eggs, believing they were beads. But every time I put my little fingers under them they would break. Later, I saw thousands of tadpoles: black, energetic and wriggling through the clear water against the background of the brown earth. This is the world I inherited from my parents. Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder."
Nobel lecture (10 December 2004), 2004
"I think what the Nobel committee is doing is going beyond war and looking at what humanity can do to prevent war. Sustainable management of our natural resources will promote peace."
Interview in TIME (10 October 2004), 2004
"The people are starving. They need food; they need medicine; they need education. They do not need a skyscraper to house the ruling party and a 24-hour TV station."
On her opposition to the construction of a skyscraper in Nairobi, Kenya, as quoted in the article Wangari Maathai:"You Strike The Woman ..." by Priscilla Sears in the quarterly In Context #28 (Spring 1991), 1991
"I kept stumbling and falling and stumbling and falling as I searched for the good. 'Why?' I asked myself. Now I believe that I was on the right path all along, particularly with the Green Belt Movement, but then others told me that I shouldn't have a career, that I shouldn't raise my voice, that women are supposed to have a master. That I needed to be someone else. Finally I was able to see that if I had a contribution I wanted to make, I must do it, despite what others said. That I was OK the way I was. That it was all right to be strong."
As quoted in the article Wangari Maathai:"You Strike The Woman ..." by Priscilla Sears in the quarterly In Context #28 (Spring 1991), 1991
Artifacts (15)
the degeneration of MacBeth of Scotland into a murdering usurper
Anglicized Scotsmen', detached culturally and linguistically from 11th-century Scotland. Ellis thus proposed that "the degeneration of MacBeth of Scotland into a murdering usurper" preceded...
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