The Norwegian Nobel Committee’s choice to give this year’s peace prize to an environmentalist was not entirely uncontroversial.
The Economist newspaper wrote after the announcement in October that ”Ms Maathai’s work, though admirable, is only distantly related to the prevention of war. There is little evidence that environmental factors cause full-scale wars”.
As an example, the newspaper wrote that ”planting trees in Darfur would not have saved its people”.
Wangari Maathai herself, when talking to reporters in the Kenyan capital Nairobi recently, called the decision ”a historic shift”.
”This was the first time they [the Nobel committee] recognised the linkage between environment, democracy and peace”.
The head of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Klaus Toepfer, said Maathai ”keenly understands and champions the links between a healthy environment and its role in overcoming poverty and helping to deliver a more stable and peaceful world”.
Wangari Maathai, born in 1940 in the town of Nyeri in the foothills of Mount Kenya, showed early on that she was a force to be reckoned with. From a modest upbringing, she went on to become the first woman in East Africa to achieve a PhD (in biology), and then the first woman to head a university department in Kenya.
Fitting then, that she would become the first black African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize.
All the ”firsts” apparently became too much for her husband, who divorced Maathai in the 1980’s, saying she was ”too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control”.
In 1977, Maathai, nicknamed Mama Miti, or Mother of Trees, founded the Green Belt Movement, which has planted about 30-million trees in Africa to protect the environment.
The movement operates at grassroots level, and 90% of its members are women, who are paid to plant trees in their immediate environment.
The tree-planting scheme has since expanded into a community development programme, and has been studied by several other African countries.
Maathai has said that ”the biggest impact of the Green Belt Movement is the sense of hope and power it gives to ordinary women. They can hardly read or write, yet they join the movement. The women respond so quickly to a common cause as they see it as a way to help the community at large”.
Today, the organisation says it runs 600 community networks that take care of 6 000 tree nurseries across Kenya.
With her staunch fight for the environment, Maathai was a thorn in the side of the long-ruling government of former president Daniel arap Moi, whose party lost control in the 2002 elections.
In 1991, she fought the government’s plan to erect a 62-storey building in a park in central Nairobi.
At the time, president Moi said in a veiled reference to her that opponents to the project had insects in their heads, and declared it un-African and unimaginable for a woman to challenge men.
A member of Parliament threatened her with circumcision if she ever set foot in his district.
”I’m sick and tired of men who are so incompetent that every time they feel the heat because women are challenging them, they have to check their genitalia to reassure themselves. The issues I’m dealing with require the utilisation of what’s above the neck. If you don’t have anything there, leave me alone,” commented Maathai.
Maathai eventually won the fight, and the Uhuru (independence) Park in central Nairobi remains untouched.
On other occasions, during environment or human rights demonstrations, she has been both beaten unconscious and detained.
When she was made assistant environment minister in the new government in 2003, she said ”At least I don’t have to spend days in police cells. It is quite amusing sometimes when I meet the same policemen who were running after me with clubs and bullets. Now they are very respectful and they are saluting wherever I go”.
During a discussion on the concept of peace earlier this month, Maatahi was asked by reporters whether she believes the world is becoming more peaceful.
”Peace can only be achieved when people decide they want peace. As long as there are people who want more, want power, men will also find a reason to go to war,” she said, and quoted Mahatma Gandhi: ”There is enough in the world for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed”.
The money that goes with the prize (about $1,3-million) has received a lot of attention in Kenyan media since the award was announced on October 8. The first question from many reporters was ”What will you do with all that money?”.
After having given the standard answer, about funding environment programmes, a number of times, the professor and assistant minister, who still lives in a modest working class neighbourhood and drives a van, said: ”I could indulge, yes, but how many cups of tea can I drink?” – Sapa-DPA