Unbowed

“When European highlanders came to the central highlands at the end of the nineteenth century, they taught the local people that God did not dwell on Mount Kenya, but rather in heaven, a place above the clouds.”

This quote shows the influence of European colonialism on Kenya. It shows how white European settlers not only instilled different religious beliefs in native Kenyans, but also—as a partial consequence of these beliefs—devalued the Kenyan landscape.

“I admire the missionaries’ patience and ingenuity in facilitating communication among people who did not understand one another’s languages. They did their work well.”

Maathai acknowledges that, while white European settlers did much that was oppressive and destructive, in the person of Christian missionaries, they also did some good. In encouraging communication among different Kenyan tribes, the missionaries did work that was not unlike Maathai’s.  

“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.”

Maathai describes her traditional Kenyan family as simply different from Western-style families, not better or worse. Despite the gender segregation and the diminished status of women inherent in her family, she continued to have a respectful bond with her father; she also had an extremely close bond to her mother and felt protected by adults even when neither birth parent was there.  

“Even though there is a hair salon, the M.K.M. General Shop, a medical clinic, the Karuma-Indo butchery, and the By Grace Café, sheep are still grazing on the side of the road [in Ihithe]. The men have still not finished the conversation they began centuries ago while the women are still selling vegetables by the roadside or carrying firewood on their backs or are bent over in the fields cultivating crops—although today it is coffee or tea more often than their own food.”

This passage shows the uneven pace at which European-style “development” has taken hold in Maathai’s childhood village of Ihithe. While men and women are now cultivating foreign crops, they continue to hold on to their own traditions and ways of communicating. The passage shows the resilience of local traditions, and the awkwardness of imposing a capitalist system on a small rural place. 

“British civil servants […] always wore very impressive uniforms, and people in uniform tend to look orderly and disciplined, and to have a mystique about them. Their uniforms were a deliberate means of enforcing respect and fear of authority as a means of making the local people subservient and therefore easier to govern. This fear is entrenched even today.”

Both Maathai’s childhood and her adult life as an activist and politician have given her an acute awareness of the theater of power—of how power is displayed not only by force and rules, but also by costumes and attitudes. Here, she describes the British colonial administrators of her childhood town and their intimidatingly polished appearance. 

“When I look at Nyeri today, I am reminded that when I was a child, people carried beautiful, colorful baskets of different sizes and types made from sisal and other natural fibers to and from the markets to transport goods […] Today, these baskets are hardly used and instead are made for tourists. The people meanwhile use flimsy plastic bags to carry their goods.”

The effects of a cash economy on a Kenyan village, as we see in this passage, are various. What had been a part of the Kenyan culture— woven baskets—has now been both monetized and devalued by being turned into a tourist item; the new plastic bags that have taken the place of the baskets are not only uglier and flimsier but are bad for the environment. 

“These experiences of childhood are what mold us and make us who we are. How you translate the life you see, feel, smell, and touch as you grow up—the water you drink, the air you breathe, and the food you eat—are what you become. When what you remember disappears, you miss it and search for it, and so it was with me.”

Maathai lived a childhood close to the Kenyan landscape and to traditional farming. Much of her adult work has been an attempt to preserve this landscape and to reconcile traditional Kenyan culture with the Westernized culture that has also formed her. 

“Years later, when we became part of the Kenyan elite, we preferred to speak in English to one another, our children, and those in our social class. While the monitor approach helped us learn English, it also instilled in us a sense that our local languages were inferior and insignificant.”

Maathai has a complex relationship to the Western-style Catholic education she received. On the one hand, she is aware of this education’s devaluation of her own culture, language, and traditions. On the other hand, learning English has opened her to a wider world and even helped her to help Kenya.

“The British propaganda kept us naïve about the political and economic roots of the conflict and was designed to make us believe that the Mau Maus wanted to return us to a primitive, backward, and even satanic past.”

The Kenyan Mau Mau uprising takes place while Maathai is away at boarding school. She therefore hears the teachers’ and administrators’ one-sided (and racist) interpretation of the uprising and will only later discover that there is another side to the story. This episode shows the self-estranging effects that come from growing up in a colonialist culture.  

“After my education by the nuns, I emerged as a person who believes that society is inherently good and that people generally act for the best.”

Maathai acknowledges that the nuns who taught her at Catholic school were high-minded and well-intended, even if also chauvinistic about their own culture and language. This passage shows Maathai’s innate optimism and belief in people’s better natures, an attitude which serves her well as an activist and politician. 

“An African has to go to America to understand slavery and its impact on black people—not only in Africa but also in the diaspora. It is in America that words such as ‘black,’ ‘white,’ ‘Negro,’ ‘mulatto,’ ‘skin color,’ ‘segregation,’ ‘discrimination,’ and ‘the ghetto’ take on lives of their own.”

Maathai experiences culture shock while at college in the United States, especially regarding American racial relations so steeped in  the lingering after-effects of slavery. The black people whom she encounters at college define themselves more by their blackness than she does, as a consequence of dealing with a still-racist society.  

“When I was born, my parents gave me the name Wangari. When I was baptized as an infant, like other Christians in Kenya I was trained to consider my baptismal name, Miriam, as my primary name […] After I became a Catholic, I dropped Miriam and became Mary Josephine, or Mary Jo, Wangari, which is how I was known when I arrived in the United States […] When I returned to Kenya, I was Wangari Muta. This was what I should always have been.”

The different names that Maathai takes on over the years highlight the different naming conventions in Africa versus Western cultures: Her first name, Wangari, is initially treated as her last name in favor of the Christian name Miriam. The changing names also show how Maathai must navigate between all of the different worlds that she belongs to. She ultimately takes on a name that is African (Wangari Muta Maathai), but that she also gives an individual twist.  

“After all the troubles that Kenya has had since independence, it was difficult to convey how exciting that time was […] My generation and those that followed failed fully to appreciate and take advantage of the great opportunities that that breakthrough presented. Instead, Kenyans have often engaged in retrogressive and destructive practices that continue to frustrate and retard the realization of promises of that time.”

In seeing the promise of an independent Kenya devolve into President Moi’s authoritarian regime, Maathai experiences the disillusionment of many Kenyans of her generation. Moi engages in cronyism and in deliberately divisive policies to hold on to power, even while celebrating himself as a champion of Africa. Maathai’s own project is to minimalize the tribalism and destruction of natural resources that he has encouraged. 

“Fighting battles with women can be very difficult and sad, because both society and the women themselves often make it appear that most women are happy with the little they have and have no intention of fighting for their rights.”

In agitating for equal benefits for women while a professor at the University of Nairobi, Maathai comes up against regressive attitudes from other women as well as from men. She realizes that many women consider feminism to be at odds with their duties as women, or else simply do not want to risk instability and exposure by asking for more rights than they have. 

“It became clear to me […] that Kenya’s and the whole regions’ livestock industry was threatened more by environmental degradation than by either the ticks in the cows’ ears or the parasites in the ticks’ salivary glands.”

In rural Kenya, Maathai studies the effect of ticks as a possible cause of malnutrition. She soon realizes that the deeper problem has to do with the destruction of native trees, in favor of cultivated foreign trees, in the area. This episode demonstrates her ability to think flexibly and independently, outside official strictures. Her discovery also leads her to found the Green Belt Movement.

“Anyone can dig a hole, put a tree in it, water it, and nurture it.”

Maathai believes that the government officials who have been training the participants in her Green Belt Movement have been unnecessarily academic and scientific in their instruction. She tells her participants—most of who are poor, illiterate women—that the process of planting a tree need not be so intimidating. Maathai’s initiative not only protects the environment but also empowers the marginalized rural people, trusting them to rely on their own instincts and observations. 

“Then a strong force pulled me out of my chair to look for a broom. ‘Sweep!’ an inner voice ordered me. I obeyed and walked to the kitchen, found a broom, and started sweeping the rubbish Mwangi had left behind.”

Upon discovering that her husband has left her, Maathai struggles with feelings of shock, disbelief, and hopelessness. She then finds some solace in taking action, however small. This reliance on action also carries her forward in her professional and political life. 

“‘Even though you blame the government,’ I said, ‘you really should also blame yourself. You need to do something about your situation. Do whatever is within your power.’”

As a part of her Green Belt Movement, Maathai often holds teach-ins for disadvantaged rural people who are isolated in all ways from the workings of government. These gatherings aim to combat cynicism and fatalism and teach people that they have more power than they believe. President Moi’s government views this democratic message as dangerous and rebellious.  

“Our insistence on people being able to speak their local languages was revolutionary.”

Maathai works to combat tribalism and isolation among her rural Green Belt Movement participants by hiring translators, so that these participants are able to communicate in their own languages. Along with facilitating communication, Maathai’s innovation is an attempt to restore participants’ pride in their linguistic and cultural heritages. 

“Many aspects of the cultures our ancestors had practiced had protected Kenya’s environment. Before the Europeans arrived, the peoples of Kenya did not look at trees and see timber, or at elephants and see commercial ivory stock, or at cheetahs and see beautiful skins for sale.”

Maathai describes her traditional Kenyan culture as reverential towards the land. Europeans introduced a reverence that was centered on the Bible rather than on the surrounding landscape—and replaced bartering with a cash economy. Both of these changes were destructive to the environment, as well as to the local culture. 

“I don’t tend to invite challenges, but I meet them. And once I do, I stick with it. I know the situation is not going to be resolved overnight, and I don’t hurry to meet a second challenge until the first is concluded.”

While Maathai is treated as an agitator and a security threat by President Moi and his government, this statement shows the calmness and deliberation that are at the heart of her activism. She remains patient and focused on solutions, and she sticks to one small problem at a time. While not avoiding confrontation, she also does not seek it out for no reason. 

“The four policemen remained on guard, two at the front door and two at the door next to the kitchen, for the second night. It often gets cold in Nairobi in the evening, so I called out to one of the officers through the kitchen window, ‘I know you’re here to do a job and that you have to arrest me. But I’m also doing my job, and I’m not opening this door. I know you’re cold. I will make you a nice cup of tea,’ I continued, ‘but I don’t have milk. If I give you some money, would you go and get some?’”

Much of Maathai’s work as an activist involves an insistence on people’s common humanity, whether she is dealing with feuding tribes, or, as in this case, with police officers barricading her home. She offers the policemen tea as a way of separating them from their official identities and acknowledging that they are just people doing their jobs, as opposed to deliberate oppressors.  

“Too often, Kenyans were looking at one another as foreigners. It is the case that the various ethnic communities in Kenya are, for all intents and purposes, distinct nations, what I call micronations […] However, in the late nineteenth century a large power with its own baggage brought us together and called us a nation. We cannot deny this fact of history, although being in one country does not mean we are identical peoples.”

As an activist and politician, Maathai must contend with a tribalized country that has been partially Westernized. She must find a way to preserve Kenya’s multi-ethnic past, while also acknowledging the inalterable changes that have taken place and forced these different communities to live together.