Wangari Maathai

Tabitha Kanogo

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780821440711
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Sozialwissenschaftliche Biographien

Wangari Muta Maathai is one of Africa's most celebrated female activists. Originally trained as a scientist in Kenya and abroad, Professor Maathai returned to her home country of Kenya with a renewed political consciousness. There, she began her long career as an activist, campaigning for environmental and social justice while speaking out against government corruption. In 2004, Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her leadership of the Green Belt Movement, a conservation effort that resulted in the restoration of African forests decimated during the colonial era.

In this biography, Tabitha Kanogo follows Wangari Maathai from her modest, rural Kenyan upbringing to her rise as a national figure campaigning for environmental and ecological conservation, sustainable development, democracy, human rights, gender equality, and the eradication of poverty until her death in 2011.

1

Childhood and Education, 1940–71

In discussing her childhood in her autobiography, Maathai paints a picture of an idyllic life set in a pristine and lush rural environment.¹ Her homeland was established by the British as the East Africa Protectorate in 1895 and then became the Kenya Colony in 1920; the independent Republic of Kenya emerged in 1964 after gaining internal self-government the prior year. Thus, Maathai was a child of two worlds, the colonial and the postcolonial. Her early life unfolded on the African reservation of Nyeri and in the shadows of the White Highlands, the settler enclave where her father was a chauffeur/mechanic on a white settler plantation in the Rift Valley Province of Kenya.²

Born Wangari Muta in 1940, Maathai had a birthday that nobody could forget—April Fool’s Day. She was born to Muta Njugi and Lydia Kibicho. Ihithe, the village of her birth, was in the Tetu division of Nyeri, in central Kenya. This was one of the many African reservations created by the colonial government in the 1920s.

Her mother had six children, and Maathai was the third. Not much is known about the other offspring, although Maathai does mention two brothers, Nderitu and Kibicho, and two sisters, Beatrice and Monica, in her autobiography.³ Because she does not speak of a hospital, we can assume that, like most of her contemporaries in rural Kenya, she was born at home. In that time and place, traditional birth attendants and older female relations were responsible for overseeing the birthing process, and hospitals (and maternity wards in particular) were few and far between. Even after a handful of facilities and services became available beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, local populations did not automatically take to them. The colonial government had a difficult time persuading people to seek antenatal services and hospital birthing. The medicalization of maternity did not come easy.⁴

Maathai was born into a large, polygamous family and had five stepsiblings.⁵ Her mother was the second of her father’s four wives. As a second wife, she would theoretically have a higher social status than the two women who married after her. In practice, however, the youngest wife, together with the first, tended to carry more favor with the husband. For this reason, Maathai’s mother would only have had a “commanding” position over the third wife. Given the social pecking order in such polygamous, patriarchal, and highly gendered households, Maathai could easily have been overshadowed by all her male and older female siblings.

In her autobiography, she describes Ihithe, the village of her childhood, as “a land abundant with shrubs, creepers, ferns, and trees [where] rain fell regularly and reliably [with] large well-watered fields of maize, beans, wheat, and vegetables. Hunger was virtually unknown. The soil was rich, dark red-brown, and moist.”⁶ Referring to herself as a “child of the soil,”⁷ Maathai seems to have developed a very intimate relationship with the land and her environment at an early age, deriving great pleasure from exploring her surroundings and cultivating her family land in this village in Nyeri.⁸ As a young girl, she would also have participated in common agricultural tasks such as planting, weeding, harvesting, winnowing, and shelling of agricultural produce. She felt “one with the land,”⁹ and this early intimacy with her natural environment clearly planted a seed of love for and appreciation of the land that provided bountifully for the sustenance of her family. Even before the age of eight when she went to school, Maathai would have participated in a variety of household chores—among them fetching water from the river, gathering firewood, preparing and cooking food, sweeping, and general cleaning.

From 1943 to 1947, she and her family lived on a white settler’s farm on the eastern outskirts of Nakuru. Kenya was a white settler colony, and Nakuru, located in the southern part of the Rift Valley, was a budding town in the 1940s, serving as the commercial and unofficial political capital of the white settler community in the White Highlands. There, settler associations lobbied the colonial government regarding land, labor, marketing, infrastructure, and other matters pertaining to settler welfare. They also met to socialize and cavort.¹⁰ Among the prominent settlers were Lord Delamere and Sir Francis Scott, who owned thousands of acres. These two men were part of a small but close-knit aristocratic diaspora; Lord Delamere (3rd Baron Hugh Cholmondeley) was the most influential spokesperson for the settlers in the region.¹¹ Denis Nolan Neylan, the settler employer of Maathai’s father, owned a mixed farm in Lanet, an area adjacent to the Nakuru-to-Nairobi road. He grew wheat and pyrethrum and also kept some livestock.

The establishment of a dual economy in colonial Kenya rendered the peasant sector subordinate to white settler plantation agriculture. This produced a large African migrant labor force, composed of people like Maathai’s father who worked on the settler plantations. Families were split up as a result, with some members remaining on the African reservations while the rest lived in the White Highlands or in towns.

In the White Highlands, Maathai’s family was part of the African labor aristocracy, equivalent to rural progressives including chiefs, headmen, African District Council members, court assessors, teachers, and successful peasant farmers. These were the first Africans to embrace formal education and many other “European” or Western conventions, including permanent houses and consumer items such as bicycles. A special rapport existed between this category of Africans and the colonial government.¹² In her autobiography, Maathai refers to the close friendship that developed between her father and his white employer, Neylan.¹³ As a mechanic and a driver, Muta Njugi was the equivalent of a foreman or a supervisor—a nyapara.¹⁴ He was not an ordinary field hand. In this respect, Maathai had a somewhat privileged childhood even as a squatter’s daughter. Squatter laborers like her father received meager wages supplemented by some of the settlers’ land, which they cultivated and used to raise animals for the sustenance of their families. Large African families like Maathai’s were desirable, since at the peak of the agricultural season, all adults and older children would be mobilized to provide labor both on the settler farms and on the squatters’ family patches.

On those rare plantations where squatter children lived near schools, they were expected to work on settler farms in the morning before attending school in the afternoon. This practice was also prevalent on settler plantations in other parts of colonial Africa.¹⁵ “Earn to learn” was the settlers’ motto. Although young Maathai did not participate in juvenile labor for Neylan, she witnessed other children working on his farm. These children would have been particularly useful in picking the pyrethrum that was cultivated there. On some settler farms, children herded settler livestock and carried out a variety of other agricultural tasks. Maathai helped on her family’s plot, where she learned to dig, plant, cultivate, and harvest. Once she started school, however, the balance of her childhood was spent on the reservation, punctuated by long stays at various boarding schools. She made occasional visits back to Nakuru.

In Kenya, missionaries—who were the key providers of formal education until the early 1940s—did not venture into the White Highlands. Consequently, an African organization known as the Kikuyu Private Schools Association (KPSA), aware of the increasing importance of formal education as a tool of social mobility, established a small number of schools in the White Highlands to cater to squatter children.¹⁶ Unlike mission schools, which received government grants, the KPSA schools were self-supporting. The government criticized them for having inadequate infrastructure and personnel, deficiencies it equated with poor education. After one such private school in Elburgon was closed in 1937, “between 50 and 53 children from the Forest Reserve, 73 from European farms, and 93 from the township, making a total of 213 pupils” were left without a school.¹⁷ Government efforts to solicit missionary oversight of the schools in the White Highlands were not productive, so in 1937, the Reverend R. G. M. Calderwood of the Church of Scotland Mission suggested deploying a bicycled African subinspector of schools in the Elburgon area, “as the time required and the distance to be traveled would be out of proportion to the matter under consideration.”¹⁸ A white inspector would not be deployed.

The KPSA’s Richard K. Njuguna, whose school in Elburgon had just been closed, wished to reopen it in Njoro, another white settler enclave about 20 miles from Neylan’s farm. Unfortunately, he was strongly warned by the district commissioner for Nakuru that “the P.C. [Provincial Commissioner] has decided that your school at Elburgon Township shall not be registered” and that “no question of transferring it to Njoro Township therefore arises. The school is definitely closed.”¹⁹ For his part, the acting director of education indicated that “the question of educating African children in the Rift Valley Province [was] now under consideration.”²⁰ The province was the heartland of the settler community, which had started around 1904. But over thirty years later, the government had not made provisions for the formal education of squatter children. Any self-help efforts designed to educate these children were frustrated by the government and its sidekicks, the missionaries. In 1938, the government directed the district commissioner, the provincial commissioner, and the acting director of education to submit a report on the state of African children’s education.

Unsurprisingly, there was no school in the vicinity of Neylan’s farm, so when it was time for young Maathai to start school in 1948, she accompanied her mother back to her rural home in Nyeri to attend Ihithe Primary School, a mission-sponsored school.

Located to the southwest of Mount Kenya, the highland region surrounding Maathai’s home in Ihithe, with its red volcanic soils, was endowed with ample rainfall, making it suitable for mixed farming. After the 1940s, Africans in this and other parts of Kenya were allowed to grow high-income crops, including coffee and tea for export.

The area around both Ihithe and Nakuru, her father’s place of work, contrasted sharply with other rural areas that were increasingly ravaged by soil erosion. In fact, these regions were compared to the American dust bowl of the 1930s.²¹ In these regions, colonialism had produced a racialized, bifurcated socioeconomic and political structure that relegated Africans to third-class citizenship, making them recipients of inferior and inadequate social services, especially medical, educational, and recreational facilities. The marginalized peasant economy on the reservations played second fiddle to the white settler plantation economy, which continued to struggle despite extensive support by the government. As well as having access to ample land, the settler economy was also buttressed with a communication infrastructure via railways and roads, a freight subsidy, and a guaranteed minimum return for crops planted. Lucrative cash crops, among them coffee, tea, and pyrethrum, were reserved for European farmers until the mid-1940s.²² Since the majority of settlers were undercapitalized, the establishment of the Land Bank in 1931, which catered to white settlers only, was a big boost, for settlers could use their land as collateral to secure loans from the bank. Using political and economic pressure, the colonial government ensured an adequate supply of cheap labor for the settler plantations.²³ Maathai’s father was part of this resident squatter labor force.

Conditions for African peasant farmers on the reservations were markedly different. As well as lacking capital, some Africans faced inadequate access to fertile land and transportation infrastructure, and they were denied the right to grow high-income cash crops: these were reserved for white settlers like Neylan, for whom Maathai’s father worked. Yet despite these limitations, the peasant sector remained resilient.²⁴ It was to the reservation that Maathai returned when it was time for her to go to school.

Her commencement of formal education was no ordinary occurrence. Even on the reservations, schools for African children were hard to come by, much like hospitals and other social amenities. However, it was not unusual for squatter children from the White Highlands to be boarded with friends or relatives in distant places that were close to schools. Maathai was lucky because she and her mother were able to relocate to Ihithe, where there was a primary school for local children.

Compounding the difficulties she faced, schools were largely the preserve of boys at that time. More broadly, gender, patriarchy, race, class, and domesticity clouded colonial policies and informed the educational experiences of female children.²⁵ Maathai was one of the few girls fortunate enough to enroll in school. In doing so, she joined a small, emergent, and privileged class of African girls and women for whom education might result in social mobility, on the one hand, or “social death,” on the other. Uncharacteristically, education did not seem to have alienated Maathai from her uneducated peers or the wider community. She always looked forward to vacation time when she was in boarding school so she could return to the village and participate in gardening and other aspects of community life.

In 1951, Maathai joined St. Cecilia’s Intermediate School, located in the Mathari Italian Catholic Mission in Nyeri. The transition from primary to intermediate school required one to pass the national Common Entrance Examination; for students who did not pass this examination, formal education came to an abrupt end. Maathai passed. Her transfer to St. Cecilia’s clearly pointed to four interrelated circumstances. First, her family members valued education and were willing to spend more for their daughter to get a superior education at St. Cecilia’s. The other option would have been for her to join a local public intermediate school with an inferior infrastructure and poorly trained teachers. Second, her family could bear the cost of that education. An ordinary village family could not afford to pay the kind of fees that boarding schools were charging. But as a chauffeur for a white settler, her father belonged to the black labor “aristocracy,” whose members were better paid compared to ordinary field hands. Toward the end of Maathai’s stint at St. Cecilia’s, a community development report for her district noted:

There are 600 empty seats in primary school in the District. . . . The sole reason for these vacancies is poverty. The existence of thousands of vacancies in the schools and thousands of children unable to fill the...