In the early 1940s, a young girl worked alongside her mother in the fields of the Kenyan highlands, tending peas, beans, millet and other crops. With no refrigerators, they harvested the evening’s food daily.
Weeding and pressing earth around her mother’s crops was a magical time for Wangari Maathai. Dusk was most precious; golden light dappled hillsides and streams as she worked the ground. “Earth and water, air and the waning fire of the sun combine to form the essential elements of life and reveal to me my kinship with the soil,” writes Maathai in her autobiography, “Unbowed.” That primal alchemy, a profound connection with the environment, still propels her today at age 70.
Maathai forged her path in a region where women traditionally have been treated as second-class citizens. When others — typically men in power — sought to suppress her or limit her choices, she has relied on an inner compass for direction.
Maathai earned a Ph.D. in biology and became the first woman in Kenya to teach at the university level. She married and raised a family, but, despite those trappings, was a pioneer. When she saw inequities, she tried to help. Maathai joined civic organizations and protested unequal treatment of women at the university that employed her.
On a visit to the village of her youth, Maathai became distressed. Once beautiful hillsides were now denuded; formerly flowing steams ran at a bare trickle. Local women complained how difficult it was to collect firewood and water. As a biologist, Maathai recognized the solution.
She showed women how to cultivate tree seedlings, pat them into the ground, and water them until they grew strong. Together, they coaxed new life from the earth and exercised a self-determination long denied women in traditional African culture.
Such activism became too much for the authorities, who pressured Maathai to stop. She refused. Her husband, a politician with whom she’d had three children, abandoned her. “I searched my soul constantly for the reasons that Mwangi had decided to leave me … ,” Maathai says. “I had tried to be a good mother, a good politician’s wife, a good African woman, and a successful university teacher. Is it that those were just too many roles for one person to excel in?”
Maathai was pressured out of her university position and evicted from her house. Job, savings, home and children were all gone. At the age of 41, she says, “I was down to zero.” Yet it was then that she sowed the seeds that grew into the international Green Belt Movement that sought to improve the environment and women’s lives by planting trees. Police beatings and jail time were her reward, yet she persevered. “When pressure is applied to me unfairly, I tend to dig in my heels and stand my ground,” says Maathai. After many decades of hard work, her efforts were rewarded with the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.
“A stumble is only one step in the long path we walk, and dwelling on it only postpones the completion of our journey,” says Maathai. “Every person who has ever achieved anything has been knocked down many times. But all of them picked themselves up and kept going, and that is what I have always tried to do.”
Illustration exclusive for Womanity.com by Andrea Ventura. Andrea Ventura is an awarded illustrator whose work appears in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Time, Rolling Stone, Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal, among others. Andrea is based in New York and Berlin.
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