Nobel Laureate Wangari MaathaiWangari Muta Maathai was born in Nyeri, Kenya, East Africa in 1940. The first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree, Prof. Maathai obtained a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Biology from Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, USA (1964), a Master of Science (M.S.) in Biological Sciences from the University of Pittsburgh, USA (1966), and pursued doctoral studies in Germany and the University of Nairobi before obtaining her Ph.D. in Anatomy in 1971 from the University of Nairobi. In 1976, she became Chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy, and, a year later, Associate Professor in the Department of Veterinary Anatomy, both at the University of Nairobi—the first woman in the region to attain those positions.

Prof. Maathai was active in the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK) from 1976 to 1987 and was its chairperson from 1981 to 1987. It was in 1976, while serving in the NCWK, that she introduced the idea of planting trees using ordinary people. She continued to develop the idea into a broad-based, grassroots organization called the Green Belt Movement (GBM), launched in 1977. GBM’s main activity involved women’s groups planting trees to conserve the environment and empower themselves by improving their quality of life. Through GBM, Wangari Maathai has helped women plant more than 30 million trees on their farms and in school and church compounds across Kenya.

In 1986, GBM established a Pan-African Green Belt Network. Over the years GBM has exposed a number of people from African countries to its community empowerment and conservation approach. As a result of GBM sharing its experiences and its belief in grassroots participatory methods to solve local challenges, a number of individuals have established GBM-like tree-planting initiatives in their own countries, or have used some of GBM’s methods to improve their programs. To date, initiatives have been successfully launched in Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Lesotho, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, among others.

In September 1998, Prof. Maathai launched a campaign formed out of the Jubilee 2000 Coalition. She played a leading global role as co-chair of the Jubilee 2000 Africa Campaign, which advocates for canceling the backlogged, non-repayable debts of poor African countries. Recently, her campaign against “land grabbing” (illegal appropriation of public lands by unscrupulous developers) and the rapacious “re-allocation” of forest land has received much attention in Kenya and the region.

In December 2002, Prof. Maathai was elected to Kenya’s parliament with an overwhelming 98 percent of the vote. She now represents the Tetu constituency, Nyeri district in central Kenya (her home region). Subsequently, in January 2003, President Mwai Kibaki appointed her Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources in Kenya’s ninth parliament, a position she currently holds.

Wangari Maathai is internationally recognized for her persistent struggle for democracy, human rights and environmental conservation. She has addressed the United Nations on several occasions and spoke on behalf of women at special sessions of the General Assembly for the five-year review of the 1992 Earth Summit. She served on the Commission for Global Governance and the Commission on the Future.

Over the years, she and the Green Belt Movement have received numerous awards, most notably the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.

In April 2006 Dr. Maathai, was honored as an Officer of the French Legion of Honor for her work on behalf of the environment and peace. The Légion d'Honneur, established by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, is France’s most prestigious honor. Past award recipients include environmentalist Dr. Jane Goodall, oceanographer and environmentalist Jacques Cousteau, anti-Holocaust and human rights activist Elie Wiesel, and deaf and blind activist Helen Keller.

Others awards and honours include the Sophie Prize (2004), the Petra Kelly Prize for Environment (2004), the Conservation Scientist Award from Columbia University (2004), the J. Sterling Morton Award (2004), the WANGO Environment Award (2003), the Outstanding Vision and Commitment Award (2002), the Excellence Award from the Kenya Community Abroad (2001), the Golden Ark Award (1994), the Juliet Hollister Award (2001), the Jane Adams Leadership Award (1993), the Edinburgh Medal (1993), the UN’s Africa Prize for Leadership (1991), the Goldman Environmental Prize (1991), the Giraffe Hero Award for sticking her neck out (1990), the Windstar Award for the Environment (1988), the Better World Society Award (1986), the Right Livelihood Award (1984) and the Woman of the Year Award (1983). Prof. Maathai was also listed in the UN Environment Program’s Global 500 Hall of Fame and in June 1997 she was named by the Earth Times as one of 100 people in the world that have made a difference in the environmental arena.

Prof. Maathai has also received honorary doctoral degrees from several institutions around the world: Williams College, USA (1990), Hobart & William Smith Colleges, USA (1994), the University of Norway (1997) and most recently, Yale University, USA (2004).

The Green Belt Movement and Prof. Maratha are featured in several publications including: The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the Approach (Wangari Maathai, 2002), Speak Truth to Power (Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, 2000), Women Pioneers for the Environment (Mary Joy Breton, 1998), Hope’s Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet (Frances Moore Lappé and Anna Lappé, 2002), Una Sola Terra: Donna I Medi Ambient Despres de Rio (Brice Lalonde et al, 1998) and Land Ist Leben (Bedrohte Volker, 1993).

Prof. Maathai serves on the boards of several organizations, including the UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament, the Jane Goodall Institute, the Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO), World Learning for International Development, Green Cross International, Environment Liaison Centre International, and the National Council of Women of Kenya.



Source: Syracuse University
. . . There She is: Mama Africa!
By Oyeronke Oyewumi
(Originally Published in JendaJournal.com)

Nobel Laureate Wangari MaathaiAnd oh, what a splendid sight to behold. We are elated; indeed we are in rapture over the award of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize to none other than our very own Wangari Maathai. Since the award was announced on the morning of Friday, October 8, the talking drums have been in full beat, the palm wine is flowing, emails are being dispatched, and phones have not stopped ringing, as African women around the world celebrate the recognition of Mama Wangari for her environmental activism: working to secure the living environment across Africa. She founded the Green Belt movement in 1977. Since then the movement has planted tens of millions of trees, she has opposed the imposition of genetically modified crops on the African environment by the all-powerful Monsanto Corporation, and she constantly organizes women to empower themselves and challenge the powers that be.

Forgive us for taking the award so personally but it is rare, if ever in the global public space that we see the words African woman coupled with such positive messages. Such accolades are rarer still. There is no better person than Wangari Maathai to represent Africans, and indeed humanity in these troubled times. Our Nobel Laureate is a scientist, a public intellectual, an activist, a mother, and an African woman. We salute her, we celebrate her, and are delighted that Mama Wangari finally has the global recognition that we have always known she deserves. We hang on to her boubou folds (as in coat tails), even as we bask in the light of her achievements.

But what does this award mean to us as Africans, as African women, and as African feminists? Despite the fact that humanity was born in Africa with the collaboration of an original African mother, African women arguably are one of the most maligned groups of women in the world. We continue to labor under debilitating stereotypes weapons of mass deception? that refuse our humanity, and ignore our accomplishments. Wangari Maathai herself draws our attention to the problem in an earlier writing: African women in general need to know that it's okay 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. The worst maligned problem for both men and women in Africa today actually is unspinning the cocoon of Western stereotypes, within which people are confined by the internationalization of Western culture's patronizing and exploitative conceptions of Africans.

Ironically, one of the most fertile sources for the inaccurate representation of African women is western feminism, at least in some of its guises. In their quest to globalize their creed, some itinerant feminists whenever they come across cases of African "men behaving badly," immediately blame "African culture." In this stance, they are in a strange bed-fellowship with some African men who insist on committing crimes against women and humanity in the name of "culture." In reality, the culture in question is not some long-standing tradition; rather, what is at issue are the male-dominant cultures of impunity that have taken root in post-colonial African societies, a problem compounded by the development of virulent misogynistic varieties of Christian and Islamic fundamentalisms that thrive on the impoverishment of masses of people on the continent. These cultures of impunity and oppression must be continuously resisted and challenged. Wangari Maathai's Green Belt movement is a blueprint for what is to be done, and how to do it.

Maathai's feminism is nurturing, holistic, inclusive, and indivisible. It is the everyday feminism of African women that the Green Belt movement showcases so well. It is a feminism that insists on motherhood as central to women's activism. The focus on motherhood is not a reification of biology or biological motherhood but recognition that mothers in raising children create and sustain the future. Motherhood by definition is visionary. As Maathai puts it, "Women, I think, have a capacity to care for others, to see beyond personal gain. Many women, I believe, are at their happiest and best when they are serving. I myself am at my happiest and my best when I am serving." There is nothing wrong with women serving, for service exemplifies the noble ideal of giving oneself to the community to better the lot of all. However, the problem that has plagued Africans in the last two centuries at least is that resources are not in the hands of those who want to serve, but in the clutches of a rapacious male-dominant elite of kleptocrats. This situation must be transformed, and Maathai's work at every level, and on all fronts, seeks to empower women to take charge and meet the challenge.

As we rejoice with Mama Wangari, her deeds and her words dare African women to look in the mirror and see the God in ourselves. As mothers women already do God's work.

For two reasons, the wine of choice at my celebration of Wangari Maathai's triumph is palm wine: it is the product of that life-affirming tree, the palm, a tree that stands dignified, tall and unbowed like the African women we celebrate. Let us drink to sustainable resistance and development, the values for which the Nobel Prize honors our own Mama Wangari.