for National Geographic News
On Friday, African environmentalist Wangari Maathai was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. Below is author Jon Bowermaster's 1991 account of meeting Maathai in a Nairobi, Kenya, hospital room. She was recovering from injuries sustained during a political protest.
The first thing Wangari Maathai did when she regained consciousness was to call a press conference. When she came out of her club-enforced daze, she was in a Nairobi hospital, having been badly beaten by Kenyan police during a demonstration the day before. It was a Saturday, and I was one of a dozen hangers-on who showed up to hear her side of the conflict.
The police had already been to the papers, claiming the outspoken environmentalist-cum-political activist had "incited" them. Upon hearing her clubber's account, Maathai couldn't help but smile over its ridiculousness.
She looked a mess—one eye blackened, her forehead labeled with a knot the size of a baseball. The thrashing administered to her 51-year-old legs made it hard for her to walk to the bathroom, where she vomited blood.
The morning's paper carried other stories of a kind found only in Kenya: A pair of Maathai's friends had been jailed for "rumor mongering," and local bus operators had decreed that anyone heard talking politics on their public carriers would be handed over to police.
The day before had begun typically for Africa's best known environmentalist. Maathai had joined a long-planned protest by mothers of political prisoners calling for the release of their sons. The outspoken Maathai felt a responsibility to the jailed men, who had been locked up for the crime of speaking out for democracy in a country run by autocratic thugs.
Merely showing up at the rally made her a target for authorities … once again. Maathai is the founder of Kenya's then 15-year-old Green Belt Movement. This was not her first hospitalization thanks to government goons.
In the past few years, as her worldwide notoriety has grown, as she's traveled abroad to accept award after award for environmental and political heroism, she has come home to be harassed, arrested, beaten, and threatened with rape. Her Nairobi office was first ransacked, then "confiscated" by the government. On that day, she'd come back from lunch to find security forces from the president's office throwing her papers and books out a second-story window onto a crowded downtown street.
Maathai's activist roots are mild by U.S. or European standards. The first Kenyan woman to earn a Ph.D. (in anatomy), and the first to become a professor at the University of Nairobi, Maathai took on a formidable challenge in 1977: To hold back Kenya's advancing desert. Rampant tree cutting and unchecked population growth had stripped much of the country's land, playing a hand in generating both hunger and poverty. Her response, dubbed the Green Belt Movement, was a national tree-planting program run by women. "Because women here are responsible for their children," she explained at the time, "they cannot sit back, waste time, and see them starve."
With the movement's support, women across Kenya established nurseries within their villages and then persuaded farmers to accept and raise tree seedlings. Green Belt paid the women two cents for each native plant they grew; exotic species were worth one-fifth as much. Farmers received the plants for free.
By 1987 she had recruited more than 50,000 women, who had spurred the planting of ten million trees. While the seedlings took root, Maathai traveled the country speaking out for women's, and human, rights. She has been rewarded for her efforts with a bevy of awards and acclaim from around the world for environmentalism and political activism.
