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.
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Wangari Maathai
As the author of this memoir, Maathai is the most fully realized character in the book. As she tells us, she has been known by different names throughout her life, including the English name Miriam and her father’s name (Muta), which she dropped in favor of her second name, Wangari. Upon converting to Catholicism, she changed her English name from Miriam to Mary Josephine (a feminization of Mary and Joseph) and was known as Mary Jo while at college in the United States. Once she returned to Kenya, she dropped her English names and became simply Wangari Muta: “That was what I always should have been” (96). Once she married Mathai, she took his last name, but she added an “a” after her divorce, changing her last name to Maathai, as a way to acknowledge both her new unmarried state and her ongoing bond with her former husband. Her name is therefore hard-earned—like much else she has achieved in her life.
On the one hand, Maathai’s taking different names demonstrates her openness to influence—such as when she converts to Catholicism. On the other hand, her name-changing also shows her independence and determination to control her own destiny. Her choice of the name Maathai (a very slight variation on her former husband’s name) after her divorce seems to reflect both of these competing strains in her character and can be seen as both a loving and defiant act.
As an activist, Maathai’s mixture of defiance and obedience serves her well. Activism involves fearless action, but it also requires thoughtfulness and self-control. While Maathai is often met with violence from the repressive Kenyan government, her response is confrontational but gentle. She rarely does anything more violent than write angry editorials, march in protests, and hold teach-ins. She also educates herself about the people for whom she is speaking, such as the rural female farmers whom she trains to plant trees. The more she understands their needs, the more expansive—and therefore threatening to the Kenyan government—her Green Belt Movement becomes. She states that an activist must be patient and stoical, and must remain focused on solutions: “What people see as fearlessness is really persistence […] If you don’t foresee the danger and see only the solution, then you can defy anyone and appear strong and fearless” (272).
Mwangi Mathai
Mathai is Maathai’s former husband. She meets him when he is an executive and later supports him when he twice runs for Parliament (he wins the second time). His bid for public office marks Maathai’s own first experience with politics and she finds the demands of being a political wife frustrating; she feels an implicit pressure to downplay her accomplishments and to present herself as a “good African woman” (110). She is frustrated by the hypocrisy of members of the Kenyan elite, such as her own husband, who “project their ‘Africanness’ through their wives, both at home and in society” (110-11).
Mathai comes across as a limited and conventional character, uncomfortable with his former wife’s strong will and impressive professional achievements. Maathai intimates that his discomfort contributed to the end of their marriage: “He saw me through the mirror given to him by society rather than through his own eyes” (139). However, Maathai is also careful to document her former husband’s gestures of decency after their divorce. She notes that he remained an attentive father to their three children and took them in for several years after their divorce, when Maathai’s work required her to travel. She also recalls a time when she was arrested and her house was left open to looters; her former husband first sent security guards to the house, then “himself kindly came, closed and locked the gate to the house after I had gone, and made sure the guards stayed” (213).
Maathai’s Mother
Maathai’s mother is a background figure in this book, but Maathai tells us that she was one of the most important figures in her life: “As far back as I can remember, my mother and I were always talking. She was my anchor in life” (13). Maathai’s lifelong closeness to her mother rests on her being the eldest daughter and having been entrusted since she was little with farming and household chores. Their relationship seems to be one between equals rather than parent and dependent. It is alongside her mother that Maathai learns to cultivate the land and develop a deep appreciation of the natural world.
When Maathai’s mother dies at age 94 while in Maathai’s care, Maathai experiences her death as devastating: “By the time of my mother’s death, I had already lost my father (in 1978, aged seventy-five), my brother, and some friends. But when she passed away, I was more upset than I have ever been in my life” (275).
Maathai finds it significant that her mother dies on International Women’s Day: “[…] the day women around the world celebrate their solidarity” (274). In general, the reader sees Maathai’s mother primarily through the associations that she evokes and her role in relation to Maathai. We do not see her as an independent character very clearly, perhaps because she and Maathai are so close: “You do what your mother does and you are always with her. The two of you become almost like one” (13).
Maathai’s Father
Maathai has a distant but respectful relationship with her father. She describes him as “dominating” and physically powerful (12). Her father was a polygamist, with four wives in total. Maathai lived apart from him for many years. Even when she lived with him, the two never shared a roof, as men and women were housed separately in their traditional rural community.
Maathai describes her father as if he were an imposing distant relation, a figure from whom little is expected, and from whom any sign of affection at all is therefore a welcome surprise. She recalls meeting her father in the town of Nakuru, when she was a child, and being surprised by his leaning down to her, saying hello, and touching her forehead in greeting: “For much of my early life my father was an overpowering figure. Yet here he was, singling me out, down at my level on the earth” (21). She also notes that as her father became frailer later in life, he also grew more approachable and “interactive with his children” (21).
