Unbowed: A Memoir (Vintage)

by Maathai, Wangari

  Since then, things have changed quite a lot. Now there are quite a few women members of the academic staff at the university and the terms of service have greatly improved for everyone, including women.

  This experience was an eye-opener for me. I had never anticipated that I would be discriminated against on the basis of my gender as often as I was, or that I could be belittled even while making a substantial contribution to society. I did not want to accept that one human being would deliberately seek to limit another, and I found myself challenging the idea that a woman could not be as good as or better than a man.

  What the struggle for equality at the university also taught me was that sometimes you have to hold on to what you believe in because not everybody wishes you well or will give you what you deserve—not even your fellow women. Indeed, I found myself wanting to be more than the equal of some of the men I knew. I had higher aspirations and did not want to be compared with men of lesser ability and capacity. I wanted to be me.

  To their credit, I never heard any criticism from the male colleagues with whom Vert and I raised these issues. Many of them were involved in our advocacy for a staff union and would have agreed that there was no reason on earth that I should receive less money than my technician. I dare say that some men probably didn't like the idea of their wives being independent in terms of housing, medical coverage, or bringing a larger portion of salary or benefits to the household. Fortunately, Mwangi was not bothered. We were already living in a university house on a leafy street in an upscale area of Nairobi.

  In retrospect, Mwangi was a beneficiary of our struggle. Once Vert and I won, she and I each received a considerable sum of money as arrears to cover the period when we did not live in university houses. Using that money, Mwangi and I bought a house in Nairobi on Lenana Road, but only his name appeared on the title deed. I could have insisted that my name also appear on the deed, but I chose to let that sleeping dog lie. In retrospect, I should have insisted—some years later, when I resigned from the university and was suddenly without shelter, I could not lay claim to that house.

  Despite Vert's and my activism for equal wages and benefits, my career did not stall at the university. In 1974, I was named senior lecturer in anatomy, then, two years later, chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy, and finally, in 1977, associate professor. Even though my colleagues and I did not make a big deal out of it, I was the first woman in all of these positions. I was quite set on an academic career, and looked forward to being named a full professor and, after that, perhaps dean of the School of Veterinary Medicine. Aspiring to be the university's head, the vice-chancellor, would have been considered too ambitious for a woman in the 1970s!

  The strange fact is that throughout my career at the university, I was at the School of Veterinary Medicine and yet I was not a vet. So I would have had to have been extremely good for my colleagues to agree that I could be the head of the faculty. Of course, even if I had been a vet, some of the men at the university would probably have fought me, but it would have been harder for them if my qualifications were in veterinary sciences. For that reason, I knew that the way to the top of the School of Veterinary Medicine would always be an uphill battle.

  The reality that I was not a vet was lost on many people I knew, including my friends. I had been in that faculty for so long that many people believed that I must be a veterinary doctor. I'd get calls and they'd say, “My cat is sick. What should I do?” or “The dog isn't feeling well. What can you do for him?” Sometimes my friends even brought their sick animals to my office! I would also go to parties where a goat would be slaughtered for that night's meal. Before they are eaten, goats are supposed to be inspected by a vet, so when I arrived, my friends would say, “We haven't started. We were waiting for you to inspect the goat.” I would reply, “I'll inspect the goat, but you eat it at your own risk!”

  6

  Foresters Without Diplomas

  A great river always begins somewhere. Often it starts as a tiny spring bubbling up from a crack in the soil, just like the little stream on my family's land in Ihithe, which starts where the roots of the fig tree broke through the rocks beneath the ground. But for the stream to grow into a river, it must meet other tributaries and join them as it heads for a lake or the sea. So, when people learn about my life and the work of the Green Belt Movement and ask me “Why trees?,” the truth of the matter is that the question has many answers. The essential one was that I reacted to a set of problems by focusing on what could be done. As it turned out, the idea that sprang from my roots merged with other sources of knowledge and action to form a confluence that grew bigger than I would ever have imagined.

  In the early 1970s, in addition to my work at the University of Nairobi, I was involved with a number of civic organizations, including the Nairobi branch of the Kenya Red Cross of which I became director in 1973, and the Kenya Association of University Women. Many of these organizations had been founded by the British and staffed almost entirely by the wives of colonial officials. After independence, Africans gradually replaced the white women. Educated Kenyan women, of whom there were still very few in the early 1970s, were often asked to volunteer their time in positions of leadership.

  I was invited to join the local board of the Environment Liaison Centre. The Centre had been established in 1974 by a group of international environmental organizations to ensure the participation of civil society groups (also known as nongovernmental organizations, or NGOs) in the work of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), whose headquarters were established in Nairobi. UNEP, the first (and only) UN agency devoted to environmental issues and the only one headquartered in the developing world, was launched following the first United Nations global conference on the environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. The Stockholm conference helped raise awareness of the realities of environmental degradation in Africa and other regions, even though many developing countries’ governments didn't agree with the solutions to the environmental crisis put forth by the industrialized nations, which they viewed as seeking to inhibit the development of poor countries.

  Most of the originators of the Environment Liaison Centre (now called the Environment Liaison Centre International) were from Europe, North America, and Asia, and felt it was important for local people—Kenyans—to serve as “alternate,” or local, board members. I was one of the few women members of the local board and became an alternate for Huey Johnson of the Resource Renewal Institute in California. Huey became a good friend and supporter and remains so to this day.

  For me, a biologist who had grown up in a rural area where our daily lives depended on the health of the environment, the issues raised at the Liaison Centre were not completely strange. For example, when we discussed biological diversity, my study of genetics was relevant. But a great deal of the information I was exposed to through meetings at UNEP, books and articles, and discussions with people working in environmental NGOs in different countries was new to me. Much of it dealt with natural sciences from a holistic perspective. Through the Liaison Centre, a whole different world opened up to me. In time, my colleagues elected me chair of the local board, a position I was to hold for more than ten years. I became so preoccupied with my voluntary work with the Liaison Centre that it almost became my second full-time career!

  Another stream that contributed to my growing environmental awareness was academic. In the early 1970s, Kenya was the best producer of livestock products in East Africa. At the university I participated in research in veterinary medicine in an effort to keep domestic animals healthy and productive, not just in Kenya but throughout the region. Consequently, I undertook postdoctoral research on the life cycle of a parasite responsible for East Coast fever, a disease fatal to imported hybrid cattle that is spread through brown ear ticks. Local bovines are almost immune to the disease. I collected hundreds of the ticks from the cattle, incised them through the salivary glands (where the parasite lodged), cut them up for microscopic observation, an
d produced thousands of slides.

  While I was in the rural areas outside Nairobi collecting the ticks, I noticed that the rivers would rush down the hillsides and along paths and roads when it rained, and that they were muddy with silt. This was very different from when I was growing up. “That is soil erosion,” I remember thinking to myself. “We must do something about that.” I also observed that the cows were so skinny that I could count their ribs. There was little grass or other fodder for them to eat where they grazed, and during the dry season much of the grass lacked nutrients.

  The people, too, looked undernourished and poor and the vegetation in their fields was scanty. The soils in the fields weren't performing as they should because their nutrient value had been depleted. It became clear to me through these observations that Kenya's and the whole region's livestock industry was threatened more by environmental degradation than by either the ticks in the cows’ ears or the parasites in the ticks’ salivary glands.

  When I went home to visit my family in Nyeri, I had another indication of the changes under way around us. I saw rivers silted with topsoil, much of which was coming from the forest where plantations of commercial trees had replaced indigenous forest. I noticed that much of the land that had been covered by trees, bushes, and grasses when I was growing up had been replaced by tea and coffee.

  I also learned that someone had acquired the piece of land where the fig tree I was in awe of as a child had stood. The new owner perceived the tree to be a nuisance because it took up too much space and he felled it to make room to grow tea. By then I understood the connection between the tree and water, so it did not surprise me that when the fig tree was cut down, the stream where I had played with the tadpoles dried up. My children would never be able to play with the frogs’ eggs as I had or simply to enjoy the cool, clear water of that stream. I mourned the loss of that tree. I profoundly appreciated the wisdom of my people, and how generations of women had passed on to their daughters the cultural tradition of leaving the fig trees in place. I was expected to pass it on to my children, too.

  Whatever the original inspiration for not cutting these trees, people in that region had been spared landslides, as the strong roots of the fig trees held the soil together in the steep mountains. They also had abundant, clean water. But by the early 1970s, landslides were becoming common and sources of clean water for drinking were becoming scarce. Ironically, the area where the fig tree of my childhood once stood always remained a patch of bare ground where nothing grew. It was as if the land rejected anything but the fig tree itself.

  Another tributary of knowledge consisted of the women themselves, who brought the urgency of the situation home to me. By the early 1970s, I was a member of the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK). The NCWK was founded in 1964 as an umbrella organization to unify women's groups, both large and small, throughout Kenya, with membership drawn from urban and rural areas. The leadership consisted of women who were successful in their business, professional, or religious lives and they gave one another moral support in whatever sphere they were involved.

  At a seminar organized by the NCWK, a woman researcher presented the results of a study she had done, which found that children in the central region of Kenya were suffering from diseases associated with malnutrition. This was an eye-opener for me, since that is where I come from and I knew from personal experience that the central region was one of the most fertile in Kenya. But times had changed. Many farmers had converted practically all of their land into growing coffee and tea to sell in the international market. These “cash crops” were occupying land previously used to produce food for people to eat.

  Consequently, women were feeding their families processed foods like white bread, maize flour, and white rice, all of which are high in carbohydrates but relatively low in vitamins, proteins, and minerals. Cooking these foods consumed less energy than the foods I had eaten as a child, and this made them attractive and practical, because available firewood for cooking was limited due to deforestation in the region. Instead, women were using as fuel materials left over from the harvest, such as corn stems and husks. This shortage of firewood, the researcher concluded, was leading directly to malnutrition as people's diets changed in response. The most vulnerable were children and the elderly.

  These facts troubled me, not least because they seemed so contrary to my experiences as a child—when there was more than enough food, the food itself was nutritious and wholesome, people were healthy and strong, and there was always enough firewood to cook with. I remembered how the colonial administration had cleared the indigenous forests and replaced them with plantations of exotic trees for the timber industry. After independence, Kenyan farmers had cleared more natural forests to create space to grow coffee and tea. Until now, however, I had not fully appreciated the multiple costs of these activities.

  Although the leadership of the NCWK was generally elite and urban, we were concerned with the social and economic status of the majority of our members, who were poor, rural women. We worried about their access to clean water and firewood, how they would feed their children, pay their school fees, and afford clothing, and we wondered what we could do to ease their burdens. We had a choice: We could either sit in an ivory tower wondering how so many people could be so poor and not be working to change their situation, or we could try to help them escape the vicious cycle they found themselves in. This was not a remote problem for us. The rural areas were where our mothers and sisters still lived. We owed it to them to do all we could.

  At the same time, women in other countries throughout the world were recognizing the need to make changes in their own communities and bring their perspectives and experiences to the global arena, and their political leaders were giving them increasing space to do so. In June 1975, to coincide with the International Women's Year, 133 governments and about 4,000 women from around the world gathered in Mexico City for the first UN conference on women.

  In the two years leading up to the women's conference, at both the Environment Liaison Centre and the NCWK, we were asking ourselves what our agenda should be for Mexico City. The NCWK held a number of seminars at which we heard from various constituencies, including women from the rural areas. These women confirmed what the researcher's study had suggested. They didn't have enough wood for fuel or fencing, fodder for their livestock, water to cook with or drink, or enough for themselves or their families to eat.

  As I sat listening to the women talk about water, energy, and nutrition, I could see that everything they lacked depended on the environment. These women were laying out their agenda. When the representatives of the NCWK returned from the Mexico City conference (I was unable to go because there were not sufficient funds), they carried the same message: We needed to do something about water and energy. The conference participants had also concluded that the world needed to address the realities of rural women, their poverty, the overall lack of development, and the state of the environment that sustained them.

  It suddenly became clear. Not only was the livestock industry threatened by a deteriorating environment, but I, my children, my students, my fellow citizens, and my entire country would pay the price. The connection between the symptoms of environmental degradation and their causes—deforestation, devegetation, unsustainable agriculture, and soil loss—were self-evident. Something had to be done. We could not just deal with the manifestations of the problems. We had to get to the root causes of those problems.

  Now, it is one thing to understand the issues. It is quite another to do something about them. But I have always been interested in finding solutions. This is, I believe, a result of my education as well as my time in America: to think of what can be done rather than worrying about what cannot. I didn't sit down and ask myself, “Now let me see; what shall I do?” It just came to me: “Why not plant trees?” The trees would provide a supply of wood that would enable women to cook nutritious foods. They would also have wood for fencing and fodder for cattle and go
ats. The trees would offer shade for humans and animals, protect watersheds and bind the soil, and, if they were fruit trees, provide food. They would also heal the land by bringing back birds and small animals and regenerate the vitality of the earth.

  This is how the Green Belt Movement began. The rest of it perhaps was sheer luck: If I'd picked something other than trees my efforts might have failed, and I may have remained at the University of Nairobi as a professor and now be retired and enjoying my pension. But that wouldn't have been half as interesting. When I reflect on the years leading to the creation of the Green Belt Movement and the years of its emergence and growth, it also seems no coincidence that it was nurtured during the time the global women's movement was taking off, or that it flourished during the decade for women (1976-1985) the United Nations declared in Mexico City.

  By 1975, I already had an idea of how I might go about encouraging the planting of trees because of events that were happening simultaneously in my personal life. In spite of his defeat in 1969, my husband's appetite for politics had not diminished. In 1974 he decided to run for Parliament again for the same constituency, Lang'ata, that he had contested five years earlier. I supported this decision and worked very hard to make sure that this time he won. This was a tall order since I was still working full time at the university and we now had three children, including a newborn, Muta. Nevertheless, we worked together and separately on the campaign trail, visiting people and talking to them about their aspirations. We were a young and highly educated couple, and I could see how much hope people were investing in us. They believed we could make a difference in their lives.

  By this time, unemployment had become a major issue for Kenya and lack of jobs was one of the voters’ main concerns. In the course of the campaign, Mwangi promised that he would create more employment for people if they voted for him. This worried me a lot. When I make a promise, I expect to keep it, and if I cannot deliver something, then I do not promise that I will. But Mwangi kept on saying that jobs would be found. “Where will he get these jobs from?” I thought to myself. “There are no jobs these days.” We couldn't simply knock on doors and ask people to give the voters jobs. Many of them had no academic qualifications or marketable skills and were illiterate. It simply wasn't possible.