Next Sunday, 11 November 2018, is the 100th anniversary of the end of the 1914-1918 war. The essay with link below, first published in August 2014 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the start of the war, is reissued as a reminder to the world of a war (and its 1939-1945 follow-up) that no African peoples should have had any business fighting in... (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe is the author, with Lakeson Okwuonicha, of the recently published Why #DonaldTrump is #great for #Africa [2018])

“The concatenation of African role in the war of 1914-1918 war or World War I”

(http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-concatenation-of-african-role-in.html)

80th birthday of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

(Born 5 January 1938, Kamĩrĩĩthũ, Kenya)

Novelist, playwright, essayist, conscience and treasured dissident voice in these turbulent times in the African World, indefatigable promoter of publishing in African languages as he, himself, has done consistently in the Gĩkũyũ beginning in the late 1970s when he publishes Caitaani Mũtharabainĩ which he later translates into English as Devil on the Cross (1980)

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross (London: Heinemann African Writers, 1987, 256pp, £9.41/US$12.20, pbk)

FOR a succinct insight into the expansive contributions of  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to the heritage of African World Letters and associated development, see, for instance, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (Dakar & Reading: African Renaissance, 2011), pp. 45-50. 

(Jackie McLean Quintet, “Action” [personnel: McLean, alto saxophone; Charles Tolliver, trumpet; Bobby Hutcherson, vibraphone; Cecil McBee, bass; Billy Higgins, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 16 September 1964])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

79th birthday of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o

(Born 5 January 1938, Kamĩrĩĩthũ, Kenya)

Novelist, playwright, essayist, conscience and treasured dissident voice in these turbulent times in the African World, indefatigable promoter of publishing in African languages as he, himself, has done consistently in the Gĩkũyũ beginning in the late 1970s when he publishes Caitaani Mũtharabainĩ which he later translates into English as Devil on the Cross (1980)

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Devil on the Cross (London: Heinemann African Writers, 1987, 256pp, £9.41/US$12.20, pbk)

For a succinct insight into the expansive contributions of  Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o to the heritage of African World Letters and associated development, see, for instance, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature (Dakar & Reading: African Renaissance, 2011), pp. 45-50. 

(Joe Henderson Quartet, “Keystone” [personnel: Henderson, tenor saxophone; Chick Corea, piano; Ron Carter, bass; Billy Higgins, drums; recorded: Studio-Masters, Los Angeles, US, [?] January 1980])

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe

The concatenation of African role in the war of 1914-1918 or World War I

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe

THERE COULDN’T be a more appropriate text from which to embark on an on-the-spot reminder to the world of the role of Africa and Africans in the intra-European World war of 1914-1918 or the Great War or the First World War than Unbowed: One Woman’s Story, the inimitable memoirs of Wangari Maathai, the award-winning celebrated environmental activist and biologist (http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=wangari, accessed 28 August 2014). In those poignant passages memoralising on uncle Thumbi, conscripted by the British occupation regime in Kenya in 1914 to fight the Germans in neighbouring Italian-occupied Somalia and German-occupied Tanganyika (contemporary Tanzania), Maathai notes (Unbowed, 2008, 27-28):

In my family there was a missing member, someone I did not find out about until I was well into adulthood. During the First World War, Africans in the colonies were conscripted to fight or serve as porters. In Kenya, if parents had an able-bodied son old enough to go to war, they were … expected to surrender him to the authorities. My grandparents had such a son, Thumbi. My grandmother did not want her son, who was more than twenty at the time, to join the war. She was in despair. So she advised him to hide in the dense vegetation near a high waterfall in the Tucha River … [but Thumbi was eventually caught … and the British] went and seized him … “He will never come back,”  my grandmother … cr[ied]. And he never did. He became one of the more than one hundred thousand Kikuyus who died on the battlefield or from starvation or influenza during the First World War … My grandmother cried for her son for the rest of her life…

(John Coltrane Quartet, “Tunji” [personnel: Coltrane, tenor saxophone; McCoy Tyner, piano; Jimmy Garrison, bass; Elvin Jones, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 11 April 1962])

Cataclysm

All of Africa lost one million of its peoples fighting in this intra-European World war in battle fronts in East Africa, Cameroon (west Africa) and in Europe itself – for Britain, France, Belgium, Czarist Russia and their allies against Germany, Italy, Austro-Hungary, the Ottomans and their allies and for Germany, Italy, Austro-Hungary, the Ottomans and their allies against Britain, France, Belgium, Czarist Russia and their allies.

ESSENTIALLY, this was a war, in addition to the follow-up 1939-1945 confrontation, that Africa and African peoples had no business, whatsoever, fighting in. The two principal protagonists in each conflict, Britain and Germany, were lead powers in the pan-European World conqueror-states that had formally occupied Africa since 1885. Britain was indeed the foremost conqueror of Africa from the group, having occupied the continent’s prized lands – lands with major population centres and vast and multiple natural resource emplacements in south, central, east and west regions: South Africa, Namibia (proxy control, post-1918 – after the defeat of Germany in 1914-1918 war), Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland, Lesotho, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania (post-1918, after the defeat of Germany in 1914-1918 war), the Sudan, Nigeria, south Cameroons (post-1918, after the defeat of Germany in 1914-1918 war), Ghana, Sierra Leone, Gambia. Britain is also the lead beneficiary of this same pan-European World states’ 400 years of enslavement of African peoples, mostly in the Americas, since the 15th century CE (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature, 2011, especially chap. 1). As for Germany, beginning in 1904 and ending in 1911, i.e., prior to the 1914-1918 war, it had carried out the genocide of the Herero, Nama and Berg Damara peoples in its occupied Namibia in southwest Africa with the following catastrophic outcome during the period: wiped out 8o per cent of Herero, 51 per cent of Nama, 30 per cent of Berg Damara (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, African Literature in Defence of History, 2001: 37-38). For Belgium, an Anglo-French ally in the 1914-1918 war, indeed the state whose initial attack by Germany triggered this conflict, it, too, entered the intra-European war in 1914 in the wake of committing a 30-year trail (1878-1908) of genocide against Africans in the Congo basin in which it annihilated 13 million constituent peoples (see multiple research by historian and linguist Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem, especially Histoire générale du Congo: De l'héritage ancien à la République Démocratique, Paris: Duculot, 1998: 344).

 (Wayne Shorter Octet, “Mephistopheles” [personnel: Shorter, tenor saxophone,  Freddie Hubbard, trumpet; Alan Shorter, flugelhorn; Grachan Moncur III, trombone;  James Spaulding, alto saxophone; Herbie Hancock, piano;  Ron Carter, bass; Joe Chambers, drums; recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 15 October 1965])

Perverse

IT is against this cataclysmic background of history that Africans found themselves conscripted by both sides of the confrontation line in 1914-1918: clearly, the double- jeopardy of conquered and occupied peoples at once fighting wars for and against ruthless aggressors. In commemorations of a century of this war that have been underway across Europe recently, a recurring theme in the media (and academia) that has been used to articulate African role in the war is “hidden” or “silent”, even “unknown”. There was indeed an academic who appeared in one of the BBC frontline current affairs newsmagazine programmes who used the bizarre phrase “not really well known” in describing “African involvement”. “Hidden”, “silent”, “unknown”, “not really well known” – by whom?!

OF COURSE nothing about the role of Africa and Africans in this conflict is “hidden” or “unknown”. On the contrary. What has duly been the difficulty that the presumed “gatekeepers” of this history (who have all along been tireless “rationalisers” of the European conquest and occupation of Africa) have had is how to explain the very perverse role of desperately occupied peoples fighting a war of/for their occupiers. I have argued severally (see, for instance, African Literature in Defence of History, chap. 1 and Ekwe-Ekwe, Africa 2001: The State, Human Rights and the People, 1993, especially parts I-II) that two critical developments of the 20th century – the wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 – shatter the cardinal features of the position of these “rationalisers” irrevocably:

(a) The 1919 treaty of Versailles that ends the 1914-1918 war frees all subjugated European peoples in Russia, Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman whilst African peoples in German-occupied  Africa [Namibia, Tanzania, Cameroon, Togo, Rwanda, Burundi] do not  have the restoration of their freedom but are, instead, occupied by Britain, France and Belgium [ironically, latter two countries hardly withstood the 1914 German juggernaut!]

(b) Africans in mostly British-occupied, French-occupied and Belgian-occupied Africa are again conscripted, beginning in the autumn of 1939, to fight against Germany, as the new war erupts, even though Germany had, since 1918, ceased to be a conqueror/occupying-state in Africa  

(c) Africans in mostly British-occupied and French-occupied Africa are conscripted, beginning in the autumn of 1939, to fight against Japan, in the forests of Myanmar, even though the Japanese were not and have never been conquerors or occupiers of Africa

(d) Belgian king and state which barely resisted the German assault on their territory beyond three weeks in May 1940 had the entire financing of the Belgian war effort [including the entire expenses of the country’s exiled royal family and government in London], totalling £40 million, paid for by Belgian-occupied Congo; this is the same Belgian-occupied Congo where the Belgian monarch and state had murdered 13 million Africans in the 30-year old genocide cited earlier

(e) Thousands of Africans perish in the battle fronts of east Africa, Europe and south Asia fighting for Anglo-Franco-Belgian conquerors/occupiers of Africa

(f) Restoration of African independence in the post-war epoch is distinctly rejected by British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in a November 1942 speech in London [“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire”, he stresses, “From our archive: Mr Churchill on our one aim”, The Guardian {London}, 11 November 2009] in his own interpretation of the August 1941 “Atlantic Charter”, formulated by him and US President Franklin Roosevelt, which declares unambiguously: “all people had a right to self-determination”

(g) In similar vein, Charles de Gaulle, leader of the “Free French Forces” who had been on exile in England since Germany overran France in 1940, rejects African independence in the post-war era during a 1944 conference of global French occupation-governors in Brazzaville, Congo

(h) Writing recently in The Mail on Sunday [London, 23 August 2014], George Carey, a former archbishop of Canterbury, recalls: “This year we are reminded by the commemoration of two world wars that the values of our democratic traditions are precious. Our fathers and grandfathers … fought against totalitarianism for the survival of democratic virtues”. Pointedly, Carey’s hearty summation does not incorporate the African experience as we have highlighted here. Such has been the asymmetrical character of this history that besides Japan, Czarist Russia/Soviet Union and Austro-Hungary, Africa has been largely under an unparalleled totalitarian straitjacket enforced, since 1885, by each and every dominant state across those two strategic battle lines that map the 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 wars.

FOLLOWING from (f) and (g) [above], it is in fact no coincidence that Britain would wage two devastating wars against  two African nations at the forefront of terminating its occupation  of Africa  in the immediate post-1939-1945 war era: against the Gĩkũyũ in the east in the 1950s, with the death of tens of thousands of Gĩkũyũ and others and in co-perpetrating the Igbo genocide in west Africa with the state in Nigeria, 1966-1970, with the murder of 3.1 million Igbo or one-quarter of this nation’s population. Both the Gĩkũyũ and Igbo had spearheaded the liberation of Kenya and Nigeria respectively from the British occupation.

It should now be evident that on a broader stretch of examination, there can’t be any such thing as “hidden” history. Instead, what some practitioners wish to do is obfuscate or, worse, deny. Writing on the “Concept of History”, Walter Benjamin has argued that the “past carries a secret index with it, by which it is referred to its resurrection” (https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm, accessed 19 August 2014). He poses two pressing questions: “Are we not touched by the same breath of air which was among that which came before? [I]s there not an echo of those who have been silenced in the voices to which we lend our ears today?” He is uncompromisingly forthright in response:

…The Angel of History must look just so. [Its] face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, [it] sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before [its] feet … nothing which has ever happened is to be given as lost to history. Indeed, the past would fully befall only a resurrected humanity. Said another way: only for a resurrected humanity would its past, in each of its moments, be citable. Each of its lived moments becomes a citation a l’ordre du jour [order of the day] – whose day is precisely that of the Last Judgement. 

AT THE CRUX of trying to manufacture this phantom of  “lost to history”, as far as Africa and Africans are concerned, Chinua Achebe’s invaluable insight follows and we will quote him at length:

[The European conquest of Africa] may indeed be a complex affair, but one thing is certain: You do not walk in, seize the land, the person, the history of another, and then sit back and compose hymns of praise in his honour. To do that would amount to calling yourself a bandit; and you won’t to do that. So what do you do? You construct very elaborate excuses for your action. You say, for instance, that the man in question is worthless and quite unfit to manage himself or his affairs. If there are valuable things like gold and diamonds which you are carting away from his territory, you proceed to prove that he doesn’t own them in the right sense of the word – that he and they had just happened to be lying around the same place when you arrived. Finally if the worse comes to the worse, you may even be prepared to question whether such as he can be, like you, fully human. From denying the presence of a man standing there before you, you end up questioning his very humanity …[I]n the [European conquest] situation presence was the critical question, the crucial word. Its denial was the keynote of [this conquest’s] ideology. (Chinua Achebe, “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration”, Kunapipi, 12, 2, 1990: 4; emphasis added.)

In her closing testimony on uncle Thumbi, Wangari Maathai writes (28): “My grandparents … never received any official word about what had happened to their [son], or any compensation. This is still an open wound. I want to say to the British government ‘My uncle went to war and never came back, and nobody ever bothered to come and tell my grandparents what had happened to their son’”.

APPROPRIATELY, one would wish to modify Wangari Maathai’s note to the British government and then re-address it, on behalf of African peoples, to all the governments and parliaments of all states involved in confrontation in the wars of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, bar Japan, Austro-Hungary and Czarist Russia/Soviet Union: “Our conscripted daughters and sons went to war to fight for you and never came back, and nobody ever bothered to come and tell us what had happened to them”.

Works cited

Achebe, Chinua. “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration”. Kunapipi, 12, 2, 1990: 4.

Benjamin, Walter. “On the Concept of History”. 1940, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm, accessed 19 August 2014.

Carey, George. “Why I, as a Christian, believe we have to banish evil British jihadists from these shores”. The Mail on Sunday, London, 23 August 2014.

  

Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert. Africa 2001: The State, Human Rights and the People. Reading: International Institute for African Research, 1993.

Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert. African Literature in Defence of History: An Essay on Chinua Achebe. Reading and Dakar: African Renaissance, 2001.

Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert. Readings from Reading : Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature. Reading and Dakar: African Renaissance, 2011.

Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert. “Daughter-of-the-soil”. Rethinking Africa,  http://re-thinkingafrica.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=wangari, accessed 28 August 2014.

Guardian, The.  “From our archive:  Mr Churchill on our one aim”. London, 11 November 2009.

Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem. Histoire générale du Congo: De l'héritage ancien à la République Démocratique. Paris: Duculot, 1998.

John Coltrane Quartet. “Tunji”. Recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 11 April 1962, accessed 29 August 2014.

Maathai, Wangari, Unbowed: One Woman’s Story. London: Arrow Book, 2008.

Wayne Shorter Octet. “Mephistopheles”. Recorded: Van Gelder Studio, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, US, 15 October 1965, accessed 29 August 2014.

Twitter@HerbertEkweEkwe

Daughter-of-the-soil

Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, review essay, Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: One Woman’s Story (London: Arrow Books, 2008), 314pp.

It is unmistakeably evident in the early chapters of this remarkable autobiography by Wangari Maathai, especially those that cover her childhood to adolescence growing up in rural Kenya of the 1940s, how very little appears to exist on the ground to prepare her for the enormous challenges she confronts and overcomes, spectacularly, just a few years subsequently. Right from the outset, Maathai is indeed the daughter-of-the-soil and she retains this prestigious accolade throughout her most fulfilling life. As she works full time with her mother on the farm, having been allocated a 15-sq.ft. plot to tend herself at the age of 7 cultivating “sweet potatoes, beans maize, and millet” (Wangari Maathai, 2008: 38), there is no certitude to Maathai’s formal education in a school eventually. But the following year, aged 8, an unexpected conversation between her mother and Maathai’s older brother on one late evening after another hardworking day on the farm, would change the direction of young Wangari’s life! Maathai learns, with staggering incredulity, of her parents and brother’s decision to send her to school:

[A]lthough [my mother] had almost no formal education, she agreed with my brother. How grateful I am that she made the decision she did because I could not have made it for myself, and it changed my life… To this day I do not know where the money for my education came from, but my mother probably raised it by working for people in the village, cultivating their land. At that time you could earn up to sixty cents doing such work. (Maathai: 40)

 Contours of conquest and occupation

But the deal for Maathai to go to school is not done, yet! Someone else’s approval must be sought, someone who is not even a member of her family! Just as the hundreds of thousands of Gĩkũyũ people’s families whose legendary fertile lands in the central and western Kenyan highlands have been seized by the British occupation regime and handed over to 40,000 European-descent immigrant-“settlers” (predominantly from Britain, Germany, South Africa, Australia and Canada) by the beginning of the 1950s (10), Maathai’s “displaced” family now lives on one such “settler” farm owned by a recent British arrival, D.N. Neylan. Maathai’s family’s official designation in their new abode, as the rest of these nascent landless Africans, is “tenant-at-will”, as distinguished writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Maathai’s compatriot and contemporary recalls his own family’s experience (Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, 2011: 46), or “squatter-on-the-farm” as Maathai prefers instead: “My father had no title to the land where he had established his household – he was effectively a squatter on the farm … [H]e could build housing for his family and cultivate crops on land Mr Neylan apportioned to him … [In return] the man, his wife, and children were all required to provide labor. They were really glorified slaves…” (Maathai: 14-15). So, given this evident use-of-labour status in the “squatters-on-the-farm” provision, Neylan pointedly asks Maathai’s father who would “pick his pyrethrum” on the farm (plant used as insecticide and picking it is a specialism reserved for African children!) if the young Wangari goes to school, to which her father replies: “Don’t worry, [Mr Neylan], there are still many children in my homestead” (Maathai: 29). Educating African children, Maathai recalls, gravely, “was not a priority for the settlers” (29).

Just as Ngũgĩ (Ekwe-Ekwe, 2011: 46-48), Maathai is a keen witness to the momentous clash of two fiercely contradictory streams of consciousness and movement in the Kenya of her childhood whose outcome would impact on her and others of her generation most profoundly subsequently. On the one hand, there is the juggernaut of an insistent, if not desperate occupation regime which wants to consolidate its stranglehold on strategic and wealthy Kenya, 50 years after the beginning of its conquest and despite the lessons of the recently concluded Second World War and the 1947 liberation of India, and the other hand is the challenge of the land and freedom-bound army of the Mau Mau resistance. The significance of this clash dawns on Maathai perhaps most acutely in her new school, a catholic school run by Italian nuns. She readily excels in all her lessons but is shocked to be confronted with a very important school rule, arguably the most important school rule, which bans the speaking or any other forms of communication in Gĩkũyũ as well as in other African languages throughout the school premises. The only language allowed in school is English. Any student who contravenes this law wears a button of shame known as the “monitor”:

 It was sometimes inscribed with phrases in English such as ‘I am stupid. I was caught speaking my mother tongue’. At the end of the day, whoever ended up with the button received a [physical] punishment, such as cutting grass, sweeping, or doing work in the garden. But the greater punishment was the embarrassment you felt because you had talked in your mother tongue. In retrospect, I can see that this introduced us to the world of undermining our self-confidence … trivialization of anything African and lays the foundation for a deeper sense of self-doubt… (59-60)

Maathai soon realises that that much-cherished anchor of family and Gĩkũyũ national life which has sustained her for ten years, this daughter-of-the-soil, is at best tenuous… It is now evident to her that for her family, living on Neylan’s farm in the wake of being thrown out of their land by the occupation, it is not only a material loss, important as this is, but, more tragically, the loss of culture or a people’s identity. Neylan’s question of who would “pick his pyrethrum” is not just the seemingly casual remark uttered by a British head of a “settler”-farm on whether or not an 8-year-old African child in Kenya should go to school but a metaphor that captures, quite graphically, the aftermath of the subjugation of a people. The impact of this history on Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, for instance,  is that 50 years hence, he writes only in Gĩkũyũ as he makes his contribution to the literary, political and philosophical discourses of the peoples of the world (Ekwe-Ekwe, 2011: 49-50). As for Maathai, the impact of this history is that 50 years later, she takes an unbowed stand to defend Kenya’s environmental heritage.

In the mean time, the broader canvass of certain features of Maathai’s own family history begins to acquire some intelligibility, on further reflection by her, in the wake of her school’s encounter with the constrictive edict on African expressivity and being. A clear example is the story of uncle Thumbi, his father’s older brother who had been conscripted by the occupation regime to fight against the Italians and Germans in neighbouring Somalia and Tanganyika, respectively, during the 1914-1918 World War I. Thumbi never returns from the campaign (later confirmed dead by a fellow Gĩkũyũ comrade who survived and had seen Thumbi “fall” at the battlefield) and his name and memory never mentioned again within the family so as not to upset Maathai’s grandmother who still grieves for her son despite the passage of time. Most tellingly, though, the occupation regime never informs Maathai’s family of what happened to Thumbi. As would be the case of the 100,000 Gĩkũyũ conscripts who died during this campaign (27), the perverse, double-jeopardy fate of an already occupied African national forced by the occupier to fight in the latter’s subsequent wars of intra-imperialist rivalries and expropriations (Ekwe-Ekwe, 2011: 56-57), Maathai describes the death of Thumbi as “still an open wound [in my family]… I want to say to the British government, ‘My uncle went to war and never came back, and nobody ever bothered to come and tell my grandparents what had happened to their son’” (28).

Name, naming, names, presence

Yet if there is ever the singular site of a clearly discernible de-Africanisation programme that projects the searing, triumphal outcome of the pan-European conquest and occupation of Africa, the focus must be on that crucial subject of name and naming – precisely the reference to the individual an how he or she is identified by the rest of society: What is your name? In occupied Kenya, the African “loses” their surname or family name. They are “officially” identified by their forename(s). In Maathai’s example, before going to school, she is known, interchangeably, as Wangari Miriam or Mariam Wangari, both being her forenames! On arrival at school, following baptism as a catholic, Maathai becomes Mary Josephine Wangari or Mary Jo Wangari – again, all forenames and no surname. In a few years, in 1960, after wining a scholarship to study at university in the United States, she is called “Miss Wangari” by her professors and fellow students on campus because everyone assumes, of course, that “Wangari” is her second name/surname! Reacting to this development, with her infectious sense of humour, Maathai writes:

This began to seem absurd, since I knew the term ‘Miss’ meant the ‘unmarried daughter of …’ and I knew I was not the unmarried daughter of myself.  I decided to put this right and began writing my name as Mary Josephine Wangari Muta [father’s name!], so I’d be called Miss Muta. I then reversed my primary and personal names, becoming Wangari Mary Josephine Muta, and later dropped Mary Josephine because the name had become too long. When I returned to Kenya [1966], I was Wangari Muta. That was what I should always have been. (96)

Maathai is 20 when she finally reconnects with her family name – not within her country but in a foreign land! The legacy of the encompassing African World historical experience of the previous 400 years is not lost on Maathai as she sees a link between her, from east Africa, and African Americans in this country where she is studying for a bachelor’s degree: “The way surnames were forgotten in Kenya struck me as similar to how many African Americans in the times of [enslavement] and segregation were known only by their first names, yet had to address white people as Mr. or Miss, followed by their surnames” (96). On this overriding question of names and naming across the African World, Chinua Achebe has aptly observed and it is important to quote him at length:

[The European conquest of Africa] may indeed be a complex affair, but one thing is certain: You do not walk in, seize the land, the person, the history of another, and then sit back and compose hymns of praise in his honour. To do that would amount to calling yourself a bandit; and you won’t to do that. So what do you do? You construct very elaborate excuses for your action. You say, for instance, that the man in question is worthless and quite unfit to manage himself or his affairs. If there are valuable things like gold and diamonds which you are carting away from his territory, you proceed to prove that he doesn’t own them in the right sense of the word – that he and they had just happened to be lying around the same place when you arrived. Finally if the worse comes to the worse, you may even be prepared to question whether such as he can be, like you, fully human. From denying the presence of a man standing there before you, you end up questioning his very humanity …[I]n the [European conquest] situation presence was the critical question, the crucial word. Its denial was the keynote of [this conquest’s] ideology. (Chinua Achebe, 1990: 4; emphasis added)

The lift!
The scholarship on which Maathai goes to the US to study at Mount St Scholastica College, Atchison, Kansas (now Benedictine College) is from the Joseph Kennedy Foundation. Three hundred Kenyans benefitted from this scholarship. The then young Senator John Kennedy of Massachusetts was very interested and personally involved in the programme which included covering transport costs for these students to their various colleges of admission in the US and back home after completion of studies. One beneficiary from this scholarship that particularly needs noting is a certain Barack Obama, Snr, from the Luo nation of west Kenya and the father of the future 44th president of the US. Obama, Snr, goes to the University of Hawaii and later on to Harvard, and returns home to work as an economist. Following Maathai’s successful bachelor’s degree at Atchison, she studies and earns an MA in biology at the University of Pittsburgh before returning home. Besides enabling her resolve the legacy of historical identity denial, Maathai has fond memories of her six years living in the US: “…America transformed me. It made me into the person I am today. It taught me not to waste any opportunity to do what can be done – and there is a lot to do. The spirit of freedom and possibility that America nurtured in me made me want to foster the same in Kenya, and it was in this spirit that I returned home” (97).
Trees

She continues her study in Kenya, registering for a phd in the biological sciences at the University of Nairobi where she also teaches. She is awarded her doctorate degree in 1971 on completion of her research, making her the first woman in east and central Africa with such a qualification. Her main work subsequently is not focused on just teaching and researching in the academy but working outside – the daughter-of-the-soil returns, once again, to her roots, to protect the environment from the degradation of soil erosion and gullying, logging and unbridled deforestation, land-grab commercialisation to grow “cash-crops” tea and coffee, for instance, and ever-expanding desertification. The fate of that enduring fig tree that she had known, whilst growing up, appears to register the definitive spur for Maathai’s founding of the movement that would transform debates on the environment in Kenya and elsewhere in Africa: “I learned that someone had acquired the piece of land where the fig tree I was in awe as a child stood. The new owner perceived the tree to be a nuisance because it took up too much space and he felled it to make room to grow tea …[I]t did not surprise me that when  the fig tree was cut down, the stream where I played with tadpoles dried up. My children would never be able to play with the frogs’ eggs as I had … or … enjoy the cool, clear water of that stream. I mourned the loss of that tree” (122).

In 1977, Maathai begins to organise women to plant trees and her influential Green Belt Movement is born and soon spreads across the country, urban and rural, involving family and neighbourhood organisations, schools, churches, trades’ bodies and the like. Under the slogan, “One person, one tree”, the goal is to plant a tree in the country for every person in Kenya’s population of 15 million at the time. Soon, the country’s forestry commission is running short of seedlings, such is the demand to plant trees everywhere! After a decade’s work, an assessment of progress so far is hugely impressive: “several million trees” have been planted with the projection that by the year 2000, the movement would be able to plant 30 million trees, twice the target at initiation (175); about 200 women-groups are now working full time in the project – from nurturing nurseries to tending planted trees; more than a 1000 green belts are being overseen by schools and students; the movement is now spreading to other parts of Africa especially Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Mozambique and Rwanda with study groups from these countries visiting Kenya  regularly for exchange of  ideas and  solidarity (177); consequently, the Pan-African Green Belt Network emerges after workshops in Kenya involving 45 representatives from 15 African countries (177).

But these successes have had huge costs on Maathai. She is subjected to a series of harassments, intimidations, arbitrary arrests and detentions by the police and other state armed agencies and even imprisonment, on a number of occasions, by the increasingly authoritarian state led by Daniel arap Moi which views her work on the environment as essentially “political”! Maathai has undoubtedly expanded the parameters of her work to incorporate organised protests against unlawful detentions and gaoling of citizens, support for freedom of speech and association, students’ and workers’ rights, and anti-corruption campaigns against public officials including those in such sensitive sectors that affect people’s everyday life such as the judiciary and law enforcement bureaus. The Maathai-led October 1989-January 1990 mass opposition to the Moi regime’s attempt to build a 60-storey tower office and a shopping complex fronted by an imposing stature of the tyrant in Uhuru Park, Nairobi’s equivalent of London’s Hyde Park or New York’s Central Park, is unquestionably the landmark, epic struggle of her illustrious career and her success in forcing the regime to abandon this project, utterly humiliated, marks the beginning of the end of that dictatorship.

To be

On a personal level, though, the strain of such high-profile and very busy work schedule begins to affect family life, and, in Maathai’s case, results in the breakdown of her marriage to an influential Kenyan politician and entrepreneur. The divorce proceedings are very bitter and play out in public with the husband, Mwangi Mathai, insisting that Maathai drop her married name (i.e., the man’s surname, “Mathai”!) as part of the “final settlement” of the marriage’s dissolution. Ironically, Maathai had felt even before marriage in 1969, three years after returning from the US, that she would rather retain her name, Wangari Muta, in keeping to her historic resolution of the name-question earlier on in the decade. She didn’t want to be a Mrs Wangari Mathai! Besides, the “Mrs” is a title introduced to the country by the British as women in pre-conquest Gĩkũyũ and other African nations kept their names after marriage. Maathai only relented then on taking on the “Mrs” and becoming Wangari Mathai because the subject was creating some strain early on her marriage. Now, eight years later, she is challenged in court by her estranged husband to drop the name that she had not sought for in the first place. So nearly 20 years since Mount St Scholastica College, Atchison, Maathai faces yet another crisis on name and naming. True to type, she responds intelligently and resolutely:   

I remember thinking to myself, ‘I’m not an object the name of which can change with every new owner!’ And I had resisted adopting his name in the first place! As a way to deal with my terrible feelings of rejection, I got the idea of adding another ‘a’ to ‘Mathai’ and to write it as it is pronounced in [Gĩkũyũ]. And so I became ‘Maathai’. The extra syllable also signified that although a part of me would always be connected to Mwangi and his surname, I had a new identity. Henceforth, only I would define who I was: Wangari Muta Maathai. (147)

 On 8 October 2004, the Norwegian Nobel Committee announces that the 2004 Nobel Prize has been awarded to Wangari Muta Maathai for her “contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace”.  As Maathai receives this news of her outstanding accomplishment, the daughter-of-the-soil turns and faces Mt Kenya: “the source of inspiration for me throughout my life, as well as for generations of people before me” (293).

Sadly, on 25 September 2011, the news is flashed across the world that Wangari Muta Maathai has died unexpectedly in Nairobi after a brief illness. She was 71. She receives a heroine’s funeral by both the Kenyan state and society. According to the latest, 2013 figures from the Green Belt Movement, 51 million trees have been planted in Kenya since the 1977 founding of the organisation. This is well over three times the number of trees envisaged by Maathai’s original conception.

References

Achebe, Chinua. “African Literature as Restoration of Celebration”, Kunapipi, 1990, 12, 2, 1-10.

Ekwe Ekwe, Herbert. Readings from Reading: Essays on African Politics, Genocide, Literature. Dakar and Reading: African Renaissance, 2011.

Maathai, Wangari, Unbowed: One Woman’s Story. London: Arrow Books, 2008.

Twitter @HerbertEkweEkwe