She started with seven trees. In 1977, Wangari Maathai planted a small group of seedlings in a Nairobi park on World Environment Day. That act began the Green Belt Movement, which went on to plant tens of millions of trees across Kenya. In 2004, she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
A rural childhood
Maathai was born in 1940 in Nyeri, in central Kenya. She grew up in a farming community and saw streams and forests that later disappeared as land was cleared.
A first in science
She studied in the United States on a scholarship and later earned a doctorate in veterinary anatomy from the University of Nairobi, becoming the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a PhD. She became a professor at the university.
The Green Belt Movement
Maathai noticed that rural women were walking further for firewood and water as forests disappeared. She founded the Green Belt Movement to pay women to plant trees, combining environmental protection with income and empowerment. The movement spread across Kenya and to other African countries.
Confronting Moi
Maathai became a leading critic of President Daniel arap Moi’s government. In 1989, she led protests against a plan to build a huge skyscraper in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park, and the project was abandoned. She opposed land grabbing in Karura Forest. She was beaten, arrested and ridiculed by officials.
Democracy
Maathai joined the pro-democracy movement that pushed for multiparty politics in Kenya in the early 1990s. She saw environmental destruction and political repression as connected.
Parliament
After Moi left power, Maathai was elected to Parliament in 2002 and served as an assistant minister for environment.
The Nobel Prize
In 2004, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded her the Peace Prize “for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace”. It was the first time the prize had recognised environmental work in this way.
Her death
Maathai died of cancer in 2011. Her memoir, Unbowed, tells the story of her life.
Trees and rights
Maathai linked environmental protection to human rights and democracy. She argued that when governments grabbed public land or destroyed forests, they were also taking resources from the poor. Her campaigns against land grabbing brought together environmentalists, women’s groups and pro-democracy activists. Many Kenyans who never planted a tree knew her as one of the bravest critics of power in the country.
Planting a tree seems like a small act. Maathai showed that millions of small acts, by women who had been ignored, could change a country’s landscape and challenge its rulers.
