Unbowed: A Memoir (Vintage)

by Maathai, Wangari

  Shortly after we arrived, people in the neighborhood came to welcome my mother home. As they engaged in conversation, I saw a group of excited children running to the homestead. They were my uncle Kamunya's children, and they immediately invited me to go with them. My mother encouraged me and off I went with my cousins. To get to my uncle's homestead, we had to cross a valley at the bottom of which was a small stream. Valleys were new to me. I was afraid I would fall as I walked down the hill. My cousins assured me I would not, but, unconvinced, I came up with a solution: I walked down the hill backward, on all fours. My cousins laughed. They were used to racing up and down the hills, even competing during the rainy season as if skiing downhill on the mud. It didn't take me much time to get used to the hills. Before long I, too, was an expert downhill mud-skier.

  Ihithe was one of a cluster of villages of about three hundred households, about nine miles from Nyeri town. Nearly everyone, men and women, were farmers, growing food for their families. There were no settler farms nearby, so everyone lived and worked in one place. It rained frequently, but the rivers were always clear and clean because the land and the riverbanks were covered by vegetation. We were encouraged to play in light rain and made to believe that, like the crops, we would get tall as a result. I loved it. Hailstorms, too, were frequent and as children we enjoyed collecting, playing with, and eating hailstones much as children play with snow. One hailstorm was so intense it turned the landscape in Ihithe white for a week.

  Although some of the roads in Ihithe are now paved and there are many more motorized vehicles, the village today looks not that different from what it was like when I was young. Infrastructure was minimal then, and it still is: Running water was not available until the 1960s and electricity has only recently begun to arrive. But the population has greatly increased and many of the woodlots have been replaced by tea plantations and houses, now made mostly from stone with corrugated iron roofs.

  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. 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. Children are still tending goats or running errands or walking to and from school, although now the schools are built of stone, not mud.

  Created by the British as an army camp, Nyeri during the 1920s and 1930s grew into a market town for the surrounding settlers, mainly ranchers and wheat farmers. Though a bustling place of commerce today, in the mid-1940s Nyeri had relatively few inhabitants. People came to town because they were bringing something to sell or buying something to take home. For rural people, traveling to town was a novelty and you didn't go unless you had something to do, since it was not a place to hang around. In fact, the British established rules and regulations that meant you could be arrested if you were caught loitering. Ironically, because you weren't allowed to loiter, the town looked organized, clean, and orderly.

  As in many other towns throughout Kenya at that time, Nyeri's shops were owned by Indians while the administrative offices were managed by British civil servants, who held various ranks such as provincial commissioner, district commissioner, and district officer. British civil servants, especially provincial administrators, 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.

  Beneath the rank of district officer, which was always held by a white man, there were local people whom the British appointed to positions that were closer to the people. The British authorities found it more convenient and effective to have local administrators acting as the ears and the eyes of the colonial administration. Initially, other local people saw these administrators, who included criminals and tricksters, as seekers of advancement at others’ expense without any relevant qualifications. They were thought of as collaborators, whose allegiance was to the British and not their own people. While eventually the jobs’ aura and power attracted better candidates, the legacy of corruption, lack of accountability, patronage, and incompetence surrounding government positions has been hard to shake off.

  Occasionally you would see white women around Nyeri, the wives of the British administrators. They did social work, and turned these voluntary positions into their occupations. They established many charities that cared for disabled, abandoned, or orphaned children, especially during the Mau Mau resistance in the 1950s. Some of the colonial wives in Nairobi also set up the Kenyan branches of well-known organizations such as the Red Cross, the Business and Professional Women's Association, the Association of University Women, and the Young Women's Christian Association.

  These days, Nyeri, like most other towns in Kenya, has seen an explosion of immigration from the rural areas. With the focus on a cash economy and cash crops (which have not delivered the expected returns), life in villages is poorer in relative terms than it was during my childhood, so people have moved to towns to look for better lives. Nyeri is crowded with people trying to make a living in every way they can—beating metal, selling fruits and vegetables, growing plants, and buying and selling merchandise, both new and second-hand.

  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. These baskets were part of the local handicrafts industry. Today, these baskets are hardly used and instead are made for tourists. The people meanwhile use flimsy plastic bags to carry their goods. These plastics litter the parks and streets, blow into the trees and bushes, kill domestic animals (when they swallow them inadvertently), and provide breeding grounds for mosquitoes. They leave the town so dirty it is almost impossible to find a place to sit and rest away from their plastic bags.

  When we first arrived in Ihithe in the early 1940s, we stayed with my uncle while a house was built for us adjacent to his homestead. This did not take long. Over the period of a month or two, my uncle would have purchased and assembled the necessary materials and sought the assistance of other men to construct the house's frame. Young men and women would have filled the walls with mud and my mother would then have asked her older female relatives and friends to help her thatch the roof. At the end of each day my mother and her women friends and relatives would provide millet porridge, arrowroots, and ripe green bananas (mĩraru) to nourish those working on her new home.

  When it was finished, our first house in Ihithe was a rectangular mud hut with two rooms: One for my mother, my sisters, and me, and the other a common area for cooking and sitting. Later, my mother and older brothers built a small hut where the older boys lived. Behind this was a small woodlot where I would disappear, emerging only when I had a small pile of firewood on my back. I loved imitating my mother and the other women I would see in the village, with firewood on their backs, singing as they walked home. When I got home I would throw off the wood, sit on it, and act very tired, much like I had seen my mother and other women do.

  Some months after our arrival in Ihithe, my mother gave birth to her last child, my brother Kamunya, who was named for my uncle. I did not know that my mother was having a baby, but I remember her calling me and telling me to call my maternal great-grandmother Wangui, who lived nearby. I ran and urged her to hurry to our home because my mother was unwell. The next thing I knew, my mother had a new baby.

  My great-grandmother was a link to my community's past. My mother would often send me to her house to take her food and firewood to keep warm, especially during the cold season. My great-grandmother made a delicious sorghum meal, which she would fon
dly share with me when I arrived. She was grateful: “Bless you, the child of my child,” she would say. “May your children remember you and bring you firewood and food.” She was in her mid-nineties, an age that was not unusual in those days. Because of the fertile soil, good climate, and abundant food, the people of the central highlands were very healthy. They worked very hard and then did not suffer from many debilitating diseases.

  It was common for older men and women, anticipating their passing on, to gather their families around them, bless them, declare their will, and appoint the administrator of their estate, who was often their first son. In those days, the prevailing belief was that after death, rather than go either to heaven or hell as Christians believe, the newly departed joined the spirit world of the ancestors. “May you sleep where there is rain and dew” was the final blessing given when someone was laid to rest.

  The arrival of my youngest brother, to whom I grew very close, did not change the shape of my life. I continued to wash my older brothers’ clothes, clean up after them, and bring them food, as was expected. Luckily, both of them were very nice to me. I often accompanied my mother as she worked in the fields. Like many African girls with their mothers, I saw her cultivating the soil and so I did the same. We did not have refrigerators or coolers, so each day we had to harvest food for that evening, especially roots and green vegetables. Although the work was hard, it was rewarding. Because of the frequent rainfall, the soil of the central highlands was often wet enough that you could make a ball with it, but still porous and smelling fresh. When you rubbed it between your fingers you could almost feel the life it held.

  In addition to food crops like peas, beans, arrowroots, millet, and maize, my mother continued to grow pyrethrum, as she had in Nakuru. At the time, it was the only cash crop black farmers were allowed to grow. Tea and coffee cultivation was restricted to the white settlers. My mother also had two cows, a few goats, and chickens—just enough to provide for our household needs.

  Although occasionally Kikuyus would eat meat, they did not eat wildlife and were mostly vegetarian. For that reason my mother did not eat chicken or eggs, which she considered wildlife. However, we, her children, loved to eat them. We had a dilemma, though. My mother would not allow us to use her pots and utensils to cook this “wildlife.” But we did it anyway, when she was out of the house, and scrubbed the pots and spoons clean before she returned. Sometimes, we obviously did not do a very good cleaning job. If my mother smelled the aroma of the chicken in the pots, she would discard them. There were times, however, when she inadvertently used the same utensils we had used and only after the meal did she learn that chicken had been cooked with them! I believe this eventually persuaded her to accept, and even enjoy, eating chicken and eggs and stop discarding her utensils.

  My mother gave me my own small garden of about fifteen square feet in the middle of her farm and provided me with instructions on how to plant and care for crops. When the rains came, she would say: “Don't idle around during the rains, plant something.” So I did. Whenever the rains came, I planted sweet potatoes, beans, maize, and millet. Because my plot was so small and I planted so early in the growing cycle, I spent a lot of time literally watching the seeds germinate. Occasionally, I would lift the seeds out of the ground to see how quickly they were growing. “No, no, no,” my mother would say. “You don't remove them. You have to cover them. You have to let them do all this by themselves. Soon they will all come above the ground.” To my utter amazement, they did.

  Maize produces a tassel when it grows. This seemed miraculous: “Where did that come from?” I would ask myself. Then the maize would produce a cob, and the minute the cob appeared, so did the birds. I enjoyed watching the birds trying to eat my maize, although sometimes I covered the cobs so the birds didn't finish them all off! When my beans produced flowers, I loved seeing the bees and the butterflies. They would come to my field first because I had planted early, and I would excitedly tell my mother what was happening in my little garden. She didn't know anything about pollination, but she explained that the presence of bees and butterflies meant that my plants were doing fine and soon we would have beans.

  At about this time, something profound started happening in the hitherto pristine Aberdare forest. The colonial government had decided to encroach into the forest and establish commercial plantations of nonnative trees. I remember seeing huge bonfires as the natural forests went up in smoke. By the mid-1940s, the British had introduced many exotic tree species into Kenya. Pines were transplanted from the northern hemisphere, and eucalyptus and black wattle from the southern hemisphere. These trees grew fast and strong and contributed to the development of the newly emerging timber and building industry.

  To popularize them, foresters gave many such seedlings to farmers free of charge. Farmers appreciated their commercial value and planted them enthusiastically at the expense of local species. However, these trees did damage, too. They eliminated local plants and animals, destroying the natural ecosystem that helped gather and retain rainwater. When rains fell, much of the water ran downstream. Over the subsequent decades, underground water levels decreased markedly and, eventually, rivers and streams either dried up or were greatly reduced.

  Soon after we arrived in Nyeri, my brother Nderitu posed a question to my mother: “How come Wangari doesn't go to school like the rest of us?” Nderitu was about thirteen at the time and had just started high school. It was not a wholly shocking question. There was a precedent in my family for educating girls. My uncle Kamunya was sending all his children, including a daughter, to school, but it was still not a common practice.

  My mother thought for a moment and then replied, “There's no reason why not.”

  Although I do not know what happened next, I suspect my mother consulted my uncle, who would have acted as my father's representative as the head of the homestead. He must have agreed, because it was decided that indeed I should join my cousins at Ihithe Primary School. Nonetheless, this was a big decision for my mother. My sister Monica had joined us, so mother had three children younger than me to look after. There were also school fees to consider. Even though they were only one shilling and fifty cents per term, that was a lot of money for a rural family then.

  My mother could easily have said, “We don't have enough money, I need her at home. What is the point of a girl going to school?” Yet, although she had almost no formal education, she agreed with my brother. How grateful I am that she made the decision she did, because I could not have made it for myself, and it changed my life! I have often wondered what would have happened if Nderitu had not asked my mother his question, and if she had not answered as she did. To this day I do not know where the money for my education came from, but my mother probably raised it by working for people in the village, cultivating their land. At that time you could earn up to sixty cents a day doing such work.

  My first day at Ihithe Primary School sticks with me. Actually, it is what happened before I got to school that is most vivid. I had a slate, an exercise book, and a pencil to write with and a simple bag made from animal skin. Later on, my uncle gave me a cotton bag from the shop he owned. Although it would not have been unusual for a girl of eight to walk the three miles to school alone, my cousin, whose name was Jonothan, nicknamed Jono, came to pick me up and take me to school. He was a little older and could already read and write.

  As we walked barefoot along the dirt path up the hill to the clearing where the primary school stood, my cousin suddenly stopped and sat down at the side of the road. He beckoned me to do the same. “Do you know how to read and write?” he asked. “No, I don't,” I replied. “Can you write at least?” he said, trying his best to intimidate his little cousin. I told him that I could not. I am not even sure I knew what writing was, really, but I did not want to let on that much. “Well, let me show you something,” he said mysteriously. “What's that?” I asked, intrigued. “Let me show you how to write.” He took out his exercise book and wrote something
on it with a crayon-like pencil, which you had to lick in order to get it to write. Believe me, cousin Jono made the most of that lick! He then presented me with what he had written. Now, of course I couldn't understand what he had scrawled on the page, but I was mightily impressed. “Wow, so you can write,” I said, my eyes widening.

  My cousin nodded and then did something I thought was truly miraculous. He took an eraser out of his bag and rubbed out what he had written. The writing simply disappeared. I had never seen an eraser before and it seemed like magic. “Can you do that?” he asked me, with more than a touch of pride. “No, I can't,” I replied sadly, thinking my cousin was some kind of genius. “This is what you will learn in school,” he intoned. With that, we continued our journey. I never forgot that day. It was a great motivation for me. How I longed to be able to write something and rub it out. When I finally learned to read and write, I never stopped, because I could read, I could write, and I could rub!

  My school was typical for its time. It had walls of mud, a floor of earth, and a tin roof. Every Friday we had to bring ash from home, put it on the floor, go to a nearby stream to bring water, and pour it on the ash. Then we swept the floor, a common way of cleaning in those days that kept the dust from building up in the classroom and got rid of pests, like fleas. From June to August, the coldest and foggiest months of the year in the central highlands, our school would be freezing cold. During this time, the teachers would have a fire burning so we could warm our hands and be able to write. Today, the central highlands are no longer as cold as they used to be, probably the impact of climate change.