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
