Unbowed: A Memoir (Vintage)

by Maathai, Wangari

  At first, people participating in the seminars would sleep over— forty or fifty of them at a time. As you'll remember, it's not a large house. I didn't have mattresses for them, but I kept a clean home so they could just lie down anywhere on the floor. After a couple of seminars, we decided it would be better if the men slept in hotels in town where there was more space and they were less likely to draw the attention of the police. I looked for funds to accomodate them.

  Another feature of living under an oppressive regime is the element of absurdity that often accompanies moments that are potentially very dangerous and intimidating. I'll never forget one night when we'd had a seminar and the men had left shortly after midnight. Someone must have informed the police that I had held a large meeting at my house, because a few hours later, I heard my watchman calling me through the window. “Wake up,” he said. “Some police officers are calling.”

  “Police?” I asked, sleepily. “It must be three o'clock in the morning!”

  “Yes,” he replied, “and they're already in the compound. They forced their way through the gate.”

  As soon as the watchman woke me up, he disappeared. He later told me he didn't want to be arrested and was watching from the other side of the back wall. So much for security!

  “Open up,” the officers called. “We know there are men here.” They poked their batons through the open windows and tried to spread the curtains in the living room. “You know you're not supposed to have meetings,” they continued. “We want to confirm that there are people in the house.” To my relief, their tone wasn't threatening. “The people were in my house, but they've left. I'm alone here now,” I replied with confidence, thinking about my security guard. But the police wouldn't believe me and became more insistent. So I went to the phone and did what anyone would do in the middle of the night when strange men demand to be let into your house: I dialed 999, the police emergency line.

  “Hello,” a policeman in the station answered.

  “This is Wangari Maathai,” I said. “I want to report that there are some thugs who've come into my compound and they're telling me that they are policemen.”

  The officer at the other end of the line didn't hesitate for a moment. “They're not thugs. They are policemen,” he said.

  “How do you know?” I asked him.

  “We sent them there,” he replied.

  “Well, in that case,” I retorted, “tell them to go home. There's nothing here.”

  But he remained unconvinced. “Open the door, so they can confirm there aren't any men in your house. There's nothing to fear.”

  I also was unconvinced. “Do you think I'm going to open my door to a group of policemen at this hour?” I asked him. “I'm not.” And I put the phone down.

  Now I had to deal with the policemen outside in my compound.

  “Go away,” I said through the window. “There's no one here.” Then I heard a female voice. “Open up. I'm a woman!”

  “What are you doing out there with those men at this hour?” I asked her, astonished.

  “I'm a policewoman!” she replied.

  “Then you can understand my apprehension,” I insisted. “If you cannot believe me, I cannot believe you,” I responded, and at that I started to pretend there were men inside, because even she wouldn't believe me. “OK. You men, you can sleep soundly, because there are policemen outside,” I said loudly. This went on for some time, with them continuing to ask me to open up and me refusing. Eventually, I just sat down in my living room and stopped responding to them. The standoff continued until the officers got tired and became completely quiet, and I returned to bed. When I woke up the next morning, I saw that the police officers had gone and that my security guard had come back to tell his story of how he had seen everything that had happened—from a good, safe distance behind the fence.

  In the fall of 1995, the UN held its fourth global conference on women in Beijing. That summer, I organized a “mini-Beijing” in Nairobi where Kenyan women could discuss and debate the issues the UN conference would address, including the environment, development, poverty, health, debt, and women's rights. That August I traveled to China for the first time and for two weeks participated in panels and workshops at the NGO Forum, held in the village of Huairou. At one of the panels, I presented a paper I had written called “Bottlenecks of Development in Africa,” which described the obstacles to Africa's spiritual and economic renewal, including poverty, debt, corruption, destruction of the environment, and the fact that development was not focused on the people.

  I also participated in the official government conference. On behalf of the Commission on Global Governance, of which I was a member, and which was then cochaired by the Swedish prime minister, Ingvar Carlsson, and Shridath Ramphal, former secretary-general of the British Commonwealth, I presented a statement to the government delegations. This was drawn from a report the commission produced titled “Our Global Neighborhood.” I laid out some of the values that women around the world were trying to bring to our global neighborhood and that the commission had discussed. These were respect for basic human rights, justice, equality and equity, nonviolence, caring, and integrity.

  A neighborhood with such values, I said, “would seek liberty for all, would promote mutual respect and tolerance, and would demand that rights go hand in hand with responsibilities. Such a neighborhood would also require that the strong as well as the weak subscribe to a rule of law. It would combat the corrupted as well as the corrupting, and would encourage participatory and legitimate democratic governance within all relevant institutions.”

  During my time in Beijing, I also met old friends who for years had been working, like me, in the trenches for women's and environmental rights, including Bella Abzug and my fellow board members of the Women's Environment & Development Organization. I participated in several forums with Bella and shared my experiences in the Green Belt Movement. I also met with younger advocates. It was wonderful to see a new generation of women working for change and a joy to reconnect with friends and colleagues I'd known for decades. Given what I had experienced in Kenya in the first half of the 1990s, it was good to be with people whose support had sustained me during dark times. We were all a little older, and hopefully a little wiser, but we were as passionate in our beliefs as we'd ever been.

  12

  Opening the Gates of Politics

  “A woman politician needs the skin of an elephant,” I had told a reporter after the 1992 elections. In 1997, another round of national elections was scheduled for December. These held real promise for the opposition. Due to pressure from the pro-democracy movement and donor nations, the government had by this time given all political parties the official recognition they needed to field candidates. This expanded the scope of Kenya's emerging democracy, but it also made it a greater challenge to unite the opposition. In the months before the election, I again spoke publicly and appealed to the opposition parties to agree on one presidential candidate and to join together under a single umbrella coalition party. Otherwise, I warned, what had happened in 1992 would be repeated…. We would lose the elections.

  In the runup to the 1992 elections, I had been asked by friends at home and abroad to run for president. Even though I had attempted to contest the by-election a decade previously, I hadn't thought seriously about a career in parliamentary politics since then. While I wanted to do what I could to ensure the opposition's victory, I still felt my primary role was to bring about societal change outside elective politics. Nevertheless, I recognized the limitations of what one could accomplish outside Parliament and active politics as a member of civil society.

  In 1997, old friends, members of the pro-democracy movement who didn't want to suffer another electoral defeat, and men and, particularly, women from Nyeri began to talk to me seriously about entering Parliament. That September, nearly a thousand people in Eldoret and another thousand in Murang'a rallied to encourage me to run to be an MP and for the presidency. In Kenya, you
need to be elected as an MP in order to also be the president, but you can run for both at the same time. I began to take these conversations, both public and private, more to heart, and wondered whether I had that elephant's skin.

  The argument of those who wanted me to run was simple: Practice through mainstream politics what you have been preaching— and doing—through the Green Belt Movement for years. People would say, “If she can do so much and she's not in Parliament, guess what she could do if she was!” By then, I knew all too well the connection between bad governance and mismanagement of resources, environmental destruction, and the poverty of millions of Kenya's people. The Green Belt Movement had provided a laboratory of sorts to experiment with a holistic approach to development that dealt with problems on the ground but also examined and addressed their individual and systemic causes.

  Even though internal and external pressure had since the early 1990s forced the government to reintroduce political parties and limit to some degree the reach of its power, government abuses (especially corruption) still continued. Poverty had deepened in Kenya, corruption was endemic, and most people felt powerless to change the direction in which the country was headed. Large areas of forest were still being logged legally and illegally, at a fast rate, or sold off to government cronies for development. These practices compounded the lack of water, fuelwood, healthy soil, and nutritious food in rural areas that so many Kenyans still experienced.

  Running for the presidency intrigued me, especially as the election date of December 29 neared and the opposition showed no sign of uniting around a single candidate. Could I be the candidate that unified us? It wasn't outside the realm of possibility. My performance as coordinator of the Green Belt Movement was well known. People could judge me on what I had done.

  I also wanted to challenge the perception among some people, including Kenyans, that good people don't go into politics, as if all politicians are tricksters and liars. Yet it was the politicians in Kenya who were making the policies that were repressing people and their aspirations and destroying the environment. It was their decisions that affected so much of our lives. To say that participating in politics is bad is to misunderstand the situation: Why leave your fate in the hands of liars or tricksters?

  Before I could start a campaign in earnest, I needed a party to support me, since you couldn't be a candidate without a political party. By then it was customary in Kenya for people to register political parties and wait for candidates. To obtain the use of a party, the candidate would be expected to project that party's profile, carry its owners into the political process with them, or pay for the party and take it over. None of these parties had real ideologies or serious platforms. They were really organized more around personalities, and that is still the case in Kenya. In 1997, some people came and offered me the use of the Liberal Party, which was very small and unknown.

  About five weeks before the election, on November 20, 1997, I announced my intention to run for a parliamentary seat in Tetu, a constituency that includes Ihithe, the village where I was born, and also join the race for president as the candidate of the Liberal Party. I was not alone: Twenty-seven parties fielded candidates in these elections, a huge increase from 1992, and fifteen people were running for president. Two of us were women, myself and Charity Ngilu, a sitting MP One of the reasons I thought I could be useful to the opposition if I joined the race for president was that it would provide a way for me to engage my fellow candidates in dialogues and urge them to form a united front so that the opposition would not again lose the elections.

  Once people become presidential candidates, it is nearly impossible to find a forum in which you can address them if you are not a candidate yourself. In addition, if you are not a candidate, it is much harder to reach the general public with your message; it is easy to become irrelevant.

  In 1997, because I was among the presidential contenders, I used the campaign to try to talk with the others and have us work together to defeat the incumbent. As it turned out, what I was trying to do was completely misinterpreted. I began by trying to bring together the several presidential candidates that, like me, came from the central region of Kenya. After that, I thought, we could reach out to the candidates from other regions. But the minute I did this I was labeled, even by many in the Kikuyu community, a “tribalist.”

  It was not an easy campaign. I had begun late and had a lot of ground to make up. I also had very little money, although friends and supporters worked to raise funds to support my candidacy. Despite their efforts, I remained grossly underfunded. To my surprise, the press, which had written mainly favorable reports of my activities in the past, now questioned my interest in elective politics and suggested I could do more for the country if I kept focused on the Green Belt Movement. Unsurprisingly, those elements of the media friendly to, or controlled by, KANU, were particularly vocal in their skepticism about my motivations.

  These attitudes, especially among the press, trivialized my candidacy and made it appear that I was not a serious candidate but rather a deliberate spoiler for Charity Ngilu, the other woman in the race. The reason I had wanted to join the race for president—to help unify the opposition so we did not make the same mistake we had in 1992—was lost. I felt bad, because I was being presented in a completely different light, far removed from my intentions. This presentation was unfair but it stuck, and whatever ideas I put forward didn't really matter.

  I had hoped to introduce to people who had suffered so much from a single political party system a different understanding of the value of multiparty politics and what such a system offers voters: a greater freedom of choice of candidates, and an opportunity to be presented with different ideologies, philosophies, issues, and priorities from which to choose. What emerged from the experience, though, was something very different. It became clear during the course of the 1997 campaign that our society was still focused on ethnicity and personality cults. Communities rallied around one of their own, encouraging well-known personalities to compete with those from other communities, irrespective of philosophies or ideologies.

  A favorite son or daughter of the community was the best candidate around which to build a “personality cult;” he or she would be most likely to bring goodies from the national treasury to each of their homes. The most important thing to the voters was that their candidate win and get into State House. There he or she would control national resources and the Treasury and ensure that his or her community got the biggest share. In this way the candidate became the ideology and the philosophy. There wasn't anything else. These personalities have enormous influence over their followers, who place all their hopes and aspirations on them. By doing so, the people re-emphasize their own disempowerment and powerlessness. In Kenya, communities talk of “our time to eat,” if their own son or daughter wins!

  Of course, each political party drew up a manifesto that articulated its objectives, philosophy, ideology, and values, but these were mostly for the purposes of registering the party and legitimizing candidates. Party manifestos, once written and presented to the registrar of parties, make good reading for students of political science. But as a people we had not matured politically to the point of using elective politics to debate philosophies, ideologies, and values, or of looking to the common good, rather than for narrow ethnic advantage. This even extended to members of the opposition, who, when they came to power too often resorted to the politics of ethnicity and personality cults (the “Big Man in Africa” syndrome). This culture permits easy corruption and misgovernance.

  I was, therefore, a bit of a dreamer to expect voters in 1997 to elect the individuals they thought could do the best job and to avoid being influenced by ethnicity and personality cults. In the end, I didn't get the chance to see what kind of support I had won because, on the eve of the election, a rumor was circulated that I'd dropped out of both races and had told my supporters to vote for other candidates. I had made no such decision; it was a dirty lie from one of the l
ocal parties, whose candidate I was supposed to have endorsed. Nonetheless, the rumor spread quickly and was both in the print and electronic media on the day of vote casting! I received only a tiny percentage of the votes for president from those who either did not hear the rumor or did not believe it. I also lost the race for Parliament for the same reason. I was deeply disappointed, but I understood.

  The reaction of the voters was not altogether surprising: Given the political culture in our land I was expected to support the local favorite son for president and seek a parliamentary seat through that presidential candidate's party and patronage. I could see that it was a waste of time for me to argue for a political ideology and philosophy or to run a campaign based on issues. That time was far into the future.

  An international team of election observers reported vote-rigging and other irregularities, but concluded that the 1997 elections were an improvement over those held in 1992. While the fragmented opposition received the largest number of votes and increased its share of seats in Parliament, the incumbent ruling party was still the largest party and President Moi found himself elected to yet another term of five years. Again, the opposition, despite garnering about two-thirds of the votes had lost because it had failed to come together.

  I was disappointed, of course, by the results; we had blown it again! There was so much work to do to overcome the political culture and give merit a chance. After the campaign, I returned to my office at the Green Belt Movement and consoled myself with the fact that if I had been elected to Parliament, I would have been limited in what I could have achieved as a member of the opposition. KANU still exerted a lot of control and refused to distribute national resources to constituencies represented by the opposition. If I had been elected an MP I probably wouldn't have been reelected in 2002, since I wouldn't have been able to do much for my constituents, who expected much from their member of Parliament.