39 pages • 1 hour read
Wangari MaathaiUnbowed
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaChapters 1-2 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “Beginnings”
In this first chapter, Maathai explains both the origins of her own family and those of her country, Kenya. She was born on April 1, 1940 in the village of Ihithe, near the small city of Nyeri. She later moved with her family to Nakuru, to the farm where her father worked, which was owned by a British settler named D. N. Neylan. Her father was polygamous, in keeping with the custom of Kikuyu men of his generation. He had four wives in total, including Maathai’s mother. The Kikuyu community is “one of forty-two ethnic groups in Kenya and then, as now, the most populous” (3).
Many beliefs and traditions of Maathai’s culture have been diluted or lost through the influence of white Christian settlers. British and European settlers divided up Kenyan land in an arbitrary way, forcing different Kenyan communities to live together. Settlers also planted foreign plants on Kenyan soil, installed a cash economy in a community that had been based on bartering, and imposed their own diets and religious customs on Kenyans. Maathai herself converted to Catholicism.
Maathai also describes the unequal way in which Kenyan soldiers fighting in World War I were treated, an unfairness which later led to the Mau Mau uprising. These soldiers were never compensated for their service and often returned home to find their land usurped by white settlers. Maathai’s own Uncle Thumbi died in the war, but the family was never officially informed of his death. It was a fellow Kenyan soldier who eventually told them: “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 happened to their son’” (28).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Cultivation”
Eventually, Maathai, her mother, and her younger sister moved back to the village of Ihithe, near Nyeri town. They completed the 100-mile voyage by foot and bus. The lush landscape of the region surprised Maathai: “The contrast between Nakuru and Ihithe could not have been greater. Nakuru means ‘dusty place’ in Massai, while Ihithe was a landscape full of different shades of green […] smooth and dark and richly fertile, but mostly hidden behind the mass of wet, fresh vegetation” (32). Like many other Kenyan towns at that time, Nyeri was run by white British administrators, with many Indian people in managerial positions.
Maathai helps her mother build a house in Ihithe near her great-grandmother; her mother soon gives birth to another girl. Maathai learns how to cultivate the soil around her home, working alongside her mother and developing a deep appreciation of nature. She also goes to school, despite the prejudice against girls attending school, and learns how to read and write in Kikuyu, Kiswahili, and English.
Maathai describes the difference between the oral storytelling culture of her own people and the reading that she is required to do at school: “The Kikuyu stories reflected my environment and the values of my people; they were preparing me for a life in my community. The stories I read in books had a completely different dimension” (50-51). She refers to a popular Kikuyu story about a “trickster” (which can be read in full in the appendix of the book).
Chapters 1-2 Analysis
These first chapters describe the origins of Maathai’s life and work. The titles of both chapters (“Beginnings” and “Cultivation”) employ a planting metaphor that will continue throughout the memoir. This reflects Maathai’s belief that the most successful life is one that never loses sight of its origins: “A tree has roots in the soil yet reaches to the sky. It tells us that in order to aspire we need to be grounded, and that no matter how high we go it is from our roots that we draw sustenance” (293).
While Maathai’s life and work will become increasingly global in focus, the world she describes in the first two chapters is intensely local. The narrative centers around Maathai’s small village of Ihithe (and the nearby town of Nyeri) and her father’s farm near Nakuru. These two places are distinct from one another, their separateness emphasized by the long distance Maathai and her family travel between them. Voyages are taken by foot and bus, which gives Maathai time to register the drama of the changing landscape: “Early in the morning, we boarded the bus and started our long journey to Nyeri […] you can imagine my shock when we climbed the ridge through Ndunduri and I discovered that on the other side of the ridge lay another world” (30).
Maathai’s upbringing exposed her early on to a sense of social injustice, along with a sense of the natural world. Since Maathai’s father worked for a white British settler, Maathai was able to register the complex bonds that can form between people of unequal social status. Moreover, Maathai was raised in a polygamous household, in which women and men were segregated to the point of living in separate houses. Her view of this upbringing is nuanced rather than wholly condemning: “In many ways, the polygamous system worked well for children. Even though my mother went to work each day in the fields, my brothers and sisters and I never felt we were alone” (19). Such an accepting point of view will serve Maathai well in her later role as an activist.
