Unbowed: A Memoir (Vintage)

by Maathai, Wangari

  In this way, communities where the Green Belt Movement worked began to develop personal responsibility for improving their quality of life, rather than waiting for the government, which wasn't very interested in the welfare of either Kenya's people or its environment, to do it. This personal responsibility became collective as communities managed their environment better. It was wonderful to see ordinary women and men speaking confidently in the meetings, in their own languages, and so honestly and openly.

  Our insistence on people being able to speak their local languages was revolutionary. Many other organizations in Kenya that worked at the grassroots level would communicate in Kiswahili or English, but many people in rural areas, especially those who have had no schooling, do not fully comprehend English or Kiswahili, and their lack of fluency causes them to be shy in meetings. I wanted to hear what they had to say, and to know that they could fully understand us. In communities where we needed translation, we would ask someone locally who knew their mother tongue as well as Kiswahili or English to interpret.

  Over time, this approach evolved into the “civic and environmental education” seminars that became part and parcel of the Green Belt Movement's work. In the early 1990s, the seminars expanded in scope to include an examination of the recent history of Kenya and how forests and land had been used and distributed in the colonial era and after independence. We also looked at issues of democracy, human rights, gender, and power.

  In addition, I saw how important culture was to the larger goals of the Green Belt Movement and to managing our natural resources efficiently, sustainably, and equitably. Many aspects of the cultures our ancestors practiced had protected Kenya's environment. Before the Europeans arrived, the peoples of Kenya did not look at trees and see timber, or at elephants and see commercial ivory stock, or at cheetahs and see beautiful skins for sale. But when Kenya was colonized and we encountered Europeans, with their knowledge, technology, understanding, religion, and culture—all of it new—we converted our values into a cash economy like theirs. Everything was now perceived as having a monetary value. As we were to learn, if you can sell it, you can forget about protecting it. Using this analysis, we integrated the question of culture into our seminars and eventually wondered whether culture was a missing link in Africa's development.

  By the mid-1980s, the Green Belt Movement had grown significantly and I had never been busier. I was working up to eighteen hours a day. By now, nearly two thousand women's groups were managing nurseries and planting and tending trees and more than a thousand green belts were being run by schools and students. Together, we had planted several million trees. Eventually, the Green Belt Movement would help establish more than six thousand nurseries, managed by six hundred community-based networks; involve several hundred thousand women, and many men, in its activities; and, by the early years of the twenty-first century, have planted more than thirty million trees in Kenya alone.

  In Nairobi in July 1985 the UN convened the third global women's conference celebrating the conclusion of the Women's Decade.

  Given the fact that the Green Belt Movement had been conceived at the start of the Women's Decade, it would have been nice if Kenya, as the host country of the conference marking the decade's completion, had chosen to highlight what we Kenyan women had achieved. It did not, and despite my participation in the preparatory meetings, it was clear the government's animosity toward me now extended to the Green Belt Movement. We were assigned an exhibition area for the conference near the National Museum, far from where hundreds of other NGOs had their stands and far from the official venue at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre. So as usual we had to make our own arrangements to share what we had done.

  I arranged for rural women to talk about their experiences with the Green Belt Movement, and organized seminars to share with conference delegates what we were doing and why. Despite the distance—traveling halfway across town—many hundreds of participants in the conference visited our booth. I also took conference delegates to visit Green Belt groups outside Nairobi, see the nurseries, talk to the women, and plant trees.

  One of the people who attended the conference was Terry Tempest Williams, a young American writer who was interested in our work. When she returned home to her native state of Utah, she established a Green Belt Movement of Utah that collected funds for us and also tried to mobilize her community to plant trees. Over the years, Terry also wrote about us and supported and publicized our work through her writings.

  The Environment Liaison Centre, whose local board I still chaired, also organized a series of workshops on women and the environmental crisis, as part of the conference's official NGO forum (called Forum ’85). The Green Belt Movement cosponsored several of the panels. Nearly thirty women from Asia, Latin America, the United States, Canada, Europe, and Africa, including me, spoke about the environmental challenges in their countries and the work they and other women were doing to address them.

  During the conference, I also finally met Peggy Snyder, the head of UNIFEM, and she and I planted a tree together. I began to realize that the Green Belt Movement was becoming widely respected in Kenya and a number of other countries as well. At the women's conference in Nairobi I also met Helvi Sipilä, who was the first woman appointed a UN assistant secretary general, a post she held from 1972 to 1980. She had overseen the UN's women's conference in

  Mexico City in 1975. After she retired from the UN, Helvi returned to Finland. I took Helvi to some of our tree nurseries close to Nairobi and explained to her how we were mobilizing women, supporting them to be innovative in how they raised seedlings, providing them with a small income, and encouraging the planting of “green belts” on farms and school compounds. She invited me to come to Finland to meet the network of women with whom the Finnish National Committee on UNIFEM, which Helvi had established, was working. I visited them the following year. As a result of my time there, UNIFEM-Finland began to raise funds to support the Green Belt Movement's work.

  In 1986, with funding from UNEP, we expanded our work to other countries in Africa, many of which were also facing desertification, deforestation, water crises, and rural hunger. Over the next three years, UNEP supported four workshops that brought forty-five representatives from fifteen African countries to Kenya to learn from us. We provided a two-week training session that included seminars and time in the field with Green Belt groups. This led to the formation of the Pan-African Green Belt Network. Through the workshops and follow-up training, groups in Ethiopia, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, and Mozambique, among other countries, launched tree-planting projects or brought the Green Belt Movement's approach to their work.

  The press's interest in Kenya and abroad also increased and I found myself invited to address meetings and conferences on the environment. The Green Belt Movement and I also began to be honored with some prestigious awards, which was unexpected and very gratifying. It is impossible to list all the awards, but every one brought joy and a sense of validation after so many disappointments, so much pain, and feelings of rejection and abandonment. In 1983, I was named Woman of the Year in Kenya by a civic group in the entertainment industry. In 1984, I received the Right Livelihood Award, founded by the Swedish writer and parliamentarian Jakob von Uexküll, and often called the “alternative Nobel prize.” In 1986, the Better World Society, a foundation initiated by U.S. media entrepreneur Ted Turner, conferred on me a medal; the following year, I was named to the UNEP Global 500 honor roll for environmental achievement. In 1988, I received the Windstar Award, founded by the late American singer and environmentalist John Denver.

  In 1989, the U.K.-based group WomenAid, established to support women and children affected by war, natural disasters, and poverty, gave me one of its Women of the World Awards at a ceremony in London. I was delighted to be honored along with Mother Teresa and Mildred Robbins Leet, an American who founded a program called Trickle Up, which provides microgrants for women in developing countries to start their own businesses. We re
ceived our awards from Diana, Princess of Wales. I was pleased to meet this fascinating woman, who in person was gracious and down to earth. I asked her if she would sign my name card. Instead, she smiled and said, “I'll sign mine for you,” and gave it to me, a souvenir I still have. When, now, I think of Princess Diana's life, I can understand something of what she went through: public recognition accompanied by moments of private loneliness and disappointment.

  These awards brought international attention to our efforts, as well as making news at home. Both helped protect me from the increasing criticism and threats I experienced in subsequent years from the Kenyan government. The awards had other benefits. Some included financial remuneration, which helped with the Green Belt Movement's budget, and they sometimes attracted attention from the media in the countries where I received the awards. In addition, since people tend to hear only bad news from the African continent, these awards allowed me to explain what we were doing, and people who supported our work could say, “The Green Belt Movement is an example of something good that is happening in Africa.”

  Unfortunately, despite the Green Belt Movement's growing recognition by the international community, far from being supported by the authorities at home, we were under attack. In 1985, the government sought to dilute our strength through direct intervention by a cabinet minister, who came to the NCWK's annual meeting and demanded that the NCWK and the Green Belt Movement separate. He wanted the Green Belt Movement to focus on the environment and the NCWK on women's issues, not seeing (or not wanting to see) that they were intertwined. My reading of the situation was that the government wanted to reduce the attention the Green Belt Movement was getting in the press and its support from donors.

  The government may also have thought (and hoped) that without the NCWK the Green Belt Movement would sink. This was similar to what it had expected to happen to the NCWK in 1980, when Maendeleo Ya Wanawake withdrew. But the National Council hadn't died, partly because the Green Belt Movement's activities kept it afloat and also drew public attention and media interest to the NCWK.

  Although the government's directive that we separate the two was not given with a clean heart, I thought separation might be advantageous for both organizations. For one, if the Green Belt Movement was independent of the National Council, the government might be less inclined to interfere with our work. The Green Belt Movement could then focus on the environment and the NCWK on its traditional mandate. In addition, I had been chairman of the NCWK for seven years and felt it was time for a change. The parting, which took place in 1987, was amicable. I did not run for reelection as chairman and Vertistine Mbaya, who had been the NCWK's treasurer all the years I served as chair, became treasurer of the Green Belt Movement. The Green Belt Movement was registered as a separate NGO. Not only did both organizations survive, but the Green Belt Movement kept its office at the NCWK headquarters, although we soon found ourselves outgrowing the space.

  As long as the Green Belt Movement was perceived as a few women raising seedlings, we didn't matter to the government. But as soon as we began to explain how trees disappear and why it is important for citizens to stand up for their rights—whether environmental, women's, or human—senior officials in the government and members of Parliament began to take notice. They soon realized that unlike some other women's organizations in Kenya, the Green Belt Movement was not organizing women for the purposes of advancing the government's agenda, whatever that might be. We were organizing women (and men) to do things for themselves that, in most cases, the government had no interest in doing.

  This unsettled the authorities, and they began to come up with reasons to curtail our activities. They invoked an old colonial law that made it illegal for more than nine people to meet in one place without first obtaining a government license. Most of the Green Belt groups had between fifteen and thirty members. We asked the officials, “Why can't we meet? Why do we need a license to discuss with other women in the neighborhood how we plan to provide firewood for ourselves?” Those who wanted to prevent the groups from gathering would stonewall and make life difficult. I assured the women that they had every right to gather without seeking the permission of the authorities.

  Fortunately, by this time, thousands of women had planted trees through the Green Belt Movement, and they had seen the value and the benefit of it. They were not going to be dissuaded by the government from participating. In addition, some members of the government at the grassroots level were beginning to appreciate the positive impacts of planting trees. In some cases, the wives of local chiefs and subchiefs were Green Belt group leaders or members.

  In the last years of the 1980s, corruption became the culture of those in power in Kenya. Many people almost began to feel foolish for having a lot of money in their hands and not misusing it. In addition, the atmosphere became increasingly repressive as the regime ignored the needs of the people and hastened the destruction of the democracy we had created since independence two decades earlier.

  The government clamped down on dissent and used heavy-handed tactics to consolidate its power and that of the sole political party, KANU. People were detained and sentenced to prison for voicing political views in opposition to the government line. Police shot live bullets into crowds of demonstrators, killing some, and the judicial system's independence was severely curtailed. Kenya had become a dictatorship, ruled, like many postindependence states in Africa, by a “strong man” president who kept an iron grip on power.

  Some of the closing of democratic space after the end of colonial rule had begun in the later years of the Kenyatta administration. In 1975, J. M. Kariuki, then a member of Parliament from the Kikuyu community, publicly attacked what he perceived as a Kikuyu misuse of power in President Kenyatta's government. As a result, Kariuki was arrested and a few hours later found murdered. Many people suspected that senior members of the government's security forces had been involved. His death led to student demonstrations and a government select committee for investigation, but his assassins were never found. Like the killing of Tom Mboya in 1969, Kariuki's death made many Kenyans realize that all was not right with the postindependence political system.

  When he came to power in 1978, President Moi released all of the twenty-six political prisoners then held by the government. However, any hopes invested in him were soon dashed. Kenya had been a de facto one-party state for several years, but in June 1982, Parliament declared it officially so, and people the regime saw as opponents began to be harassed and intimidated. Many of them decided to go into exile abroad while others were pressured by the government to leave the country. Those deemed subversive were placed in detention. A number of them died in custody, where conditions were harsh and torture was common. Journalists were harassed when they reported such trials and arrests.

  In August 1982, I was in Sweden attending a meeting when I learned that members of the Kenya Air Force had attempted a coup against President Moi. The coup failed, and after looting broke out in Nairobi, it is estimated that government security forces killed several hundred people, an action that they claimed was necessary to restore order. The president used the attempted coup as an opportunity to amass even more power and dismiss some elements in the government.

  The University of Nairobi became a center of student resistance to the government's activities. Security forces clashed repeatedly with student demonstrators who called for more political freedom. In 1985, government forces killed at least twelve students, while two years later the government closed the university—as it was to do several times in coming years—and arrested student leaders. As a way to keep their opponents divided and insecure, elements in the government also played different ethnic communities off one another. This was to have devastating consequences in the early 1990s when tribal clashes broke out in different parts of the country.

  In 1988, supporters of greater political openness in Kenya focused their energy and commitment on that year's national elections. The Green Belt Movement joined othe
rs in carrying out pro-democracy activities such as registering voters for the election and pressing for constitutional reforms and political space to ensure freedom of thought and expression. In this way, the Green Belt Movement was not only an environmental, women's, and human rights movement, but also part of the broader movement for democracy.

  We hoped that these elections would provide the people of Kenya with a fairer and truer representation of their aspirations and beliefs. To our dismay and despair, however, the elections were the most disturbing and distorted in Kenya's history. The government introduced a highly controversial system of “queue” voting. Voters lined up behind their candidate and election officials counted each line and then told the people to go home. When election officials announced the winner, it was often the candidate with the shortest line of voters behind him! Since the voters were at home, there was nothing that could be done: The winner had been declared. The vote-rigging was so blatant that people who had lost their races were declared the winners in broad daylight with no embarrassment whatsoever on the part of the government.

  After the elections, Parliament passed a bill to further limit the independence of the Kenyan judiciary. The press was harassed and intimidated, too. The Daily Nation, one of the country's most widely read newspapers, was banned from covering Parliament for four months. Many of us in the pro-democracy movement felt depressed and helpless. “This ruling party is going to be here forever,” we said to one another. This was not helped by the fact that after the elections President Moi declared that KANU would rule for a hundred years.

  I knew that we could not live with a political system that killed creativity, nurtured corruption, and produced people who were afraid of their own leaders. It would be only a matter of time before the government and I came into further conflict. The incident that brought me into direct confrontation with the authorities began, simply and essentially, with one person deciding that something had to be done to protect Uhuru Park.