Wangari Maathai
Wangari Maathai founded a movement that planted tens of millions of trees and was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Born in 1940 in Nyeri in the Kenyan highlands to Kikuyu farmers, she was educated by Catholic sisters and won a place on the Kennedy Airlift, which took several hundred East African students to American universities in 1960. She took degrees in Kansas and Pittsburgh, returned to Nairobi, and in 1971 became the first woman in East or Central Africa to earn a doctorate, and later the first to chair a department and hold a professorship there. She founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977 after listening to rural women describe streams drying up, firewood disappearing and food becoming scarce. The response was to pay women a small sum for each seedling that survived — which addressed deforestation, soil erosion, fuel and income at once, and gave them a reason to organise. Over forty million trees were planted. The politics followed from it. Land was being cleared by people connected to the government, and defending forests meant confronting them. She led the campaign that stopped a sixty-storey tower planned for Uhuru Park in 1989, and was beaten unconscious by police in 1992 while supporting a hunger strike by mothers of political prisoners. She was arrested repeatedly, denounced in parliament and called a threat to national security. She was elected to parliament in 2002 with ninety-eight per cent of the vote and served as a deputy minister for the environment. She received the Nobel Prize in 2004 and died of cancer in 2011.
- Lived: 1940 CE – 2011 CE
- Nationality: Kenyan
- Roles: statesman, scientist, reformer
