Kenyan's Painful Path to Nobel Peace Prize

Jon Bowermaster
for National Geographic News

October 19, 2004

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.

None of her activities were looked upon favorably by Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi. Her gravest sin—either her biggest mistake or success, depending on whose side you take—came in the late 1980s, when she very publicly scuttled Moi's plan to build a 60-story office story in Uhuru Park, adjoining downtown Nairobi.

The building was to be flanked by a large statue of the 17-year president. Both were to be paid for by foreign aid monies. By personal plea and public rally, Maathai persuaded donors that the project was environmentally, aesthetically, and fiscally unsound, and Moi's dream was defeated.

While that victory may have earned her popularity among the workers who used the park, it assured her the eternal enmity of the ruling party, in particular Moi and the government-owned newspaper and television stations, which were to have gotten luxurious new offices in the building. The day after the project was officially announced dead, headlines in The Daily Nation accused Maathai of "having insects in her head."

A year later, when she won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, CNN International ran a story about the six winners from around the globe. Government-employed censors edited out the three-minute segment on Maathai when the piece aired in Kenya. She is rumored to be on Moi's short list for either extradition, or … an "accident." (Not out of the question from a government whose finance minister once threw a political opponent out of a helicopter.)

Maathai's recent beating was part of a constant campaign of harassment against her. Soon after his office building was KO'd, Moi ruled that foreign assistance to women's development projects must be channeled through the state women's organization, effectively cutting off outside aid to the Green Belt Movement. Maathai is currently awaiting trial on charges of incitement and "rumor mongering." Yet she continues to be publicly critical of the police state that her homeland has become.

After reading the front page of the newspaper, sitting up in her hospital bed, Maathai looks up at the crowd gathered in her hospital room. "They don't understand, do they? I'm not being critical of the government. I'm just talking the truth. Perhaps President Moi believes I should protect the image of our government, just because it is our government. But I know that I am talking about a government that does not like to be criticized. That is why I have been in trouble."

Despite her bruises, she comes off more steadfast than scared. "I know I am in danger, and I know that the government has tried to push me aside. At the moment, because of the political turmoil in my country, one cannot rule out the possibility of the worst, so I do feel that I need to take care of myself. I need to stay away from 'dangerous ground,'" she said.

"But that doesn't mean that I will back down. I will not just go away, which is what they would like. Because this is where I am needed most. My message has not shifted, if anything it has become less subtle."

Editor's note: Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi left office in December 2002, after a constitutional ban prevented him from seeking reelection.

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