Unbowed: A Memoir (Vintage)

by Maathai, Wangari

  By then, I realized I had a deep gash on the top of my head and blood was streaming down my neck. I was furious, not so much with the thugs as with the police. My head still warm with the blood, I reported the assault and told the officers that we knew who the attackers were. We offered to take them back to the scene of the violence so they could arrest our assailants. If you can believe it, the police didn't move at all. Instead, they asked me to sign a formal complaint testifying to my assault. So, sign it I did: I took my finger and dipped it into the blood pouring from my head and wrote a red “X” on that paper—so they would know how I felt about what had happened and also be unable to avoid the evidence in front of them. After that, I went to Nairobi Hospital, where my doctor told me I was very lucky. If I'd been hit again, he said, I might well not have lived.

  Why the police did nothing did not remain a mystery for long. That evening, KTN ran a story with footage showing that a cameraman who had arrived before us had a shot of an officer conversing with the thugs at the gate. It showed us, and all Kenya, that the attack was organized and approved by the police. That report, and the coverage in both local and international papers over the next few days, led to universal condemnation of the attack; the U.S. ambassador, members of the Kenyan clergy, opposition MPs, and the press all spoke out. In an unusually frank statement, the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, on whose Advisory Board on Disarmament I served, condemned the beating and the violence that accompanied it.

  Subsequently, I learned that many embassies, international organizations, and individuals raised their voices, asking the president why it was necessary to destroy the forest, why we had to be beaten when we demonstrated, and why it was a crime to demonstrate in the first place. After the violence of January 8, the clergy got fully involved and brought the weight of their authority not only to the selling off of a public forest but also the violent assault on members of the public and MPs.

  The president offered his opinion: He couldn't understand why people would be opposed to the luxury development in Karura Forest. After all, he said, much of Nairobi had been built out of forest land, and this was just another example of the city striding forward into the future. Others begged to differ, and what had happened on January 8 only further inflamed already existing tensions in the country. University students, completely independently from the Green Belt Movement, organized their own protest.

  At the end of January, a number of students commandeered a tractor from the University of Nairobi, along with public buses and other vehicles, and rammed the gate that denied access to Karura Forest. When the tractor hit the gate, it stalled and the police pounced. The students scattered everywhere, many running into UNEP's compound with the police in riot control trucks hot on their heels.

  UNEP's governing council was meeting that day and the students thought they would be safe on UNEP's grounds, since nobody was supposed to be followed onto UN property. The students had other reasons to feel secure. Under its executive directors Mustafa Tolba and then Dr. Toepfer, UNEP had supported the Green Belt Movement and other organizations financially and had tried to ensure that we weren't threatened by the government in our efforts to protect the environment. UNEP officials often spoke out against governmental mismanagement of the environment and its harassment of the Green Belt Movement, diplomatic protocol notwithstanding. This was a serious matter of environmental and other human rights.

  The students were, however, wrong in assuming that the police would respect this understanding. Once on the UNEP compound, the police beat them savagely. At least two students were admitted to the hospital with serious injuries. Klaus Toepfer himself broke all protocol and lodged a formal complaint with the government. The next day riots broke out throughout the city. The students were on fire—angry about the destruction of the forest and angry about the government's repression and its abuse of citizens. For six hours they battled with the police. Tear gas and bullets flew, causing the universities in Nairobi to be closed and the president to realize that something had to be done to stop Karura Forest from becoming a tinderbox that set the whole country on fire.

  Thankfully, as 1999 progressed, tempers on both sides cooled. Green Belt Movement members visited Karura a few more times to plant trees. Then one day we learned from an old man who was one of our informers that the developers had left the forest. On August 16, 1999, the president announced that he was banning, with immediate effect, all allocation of public land. Soon all construction in the forest ceased and, according to our informers, even the hired thugs were moved out.

  Illegal logging of trees in Karura Forest continued, however. Despite our complaints to the conservator of forests and the fact that forest guards were posted inside Karura, it appeared that the people who had been given the plots by the government were determined to clear the forest of its trees. This logging continued with the full knowledge of the forest department until the 2002 elections, when a new government was voted into office. After the 2002 elections, the Green Belt Movement and the government developed a new relationship and formed a partnership for the restoration of Karura Forest, an initiative that continues to this day.

  Many people assume that I must have been inordinately brave to face down the thugs and police during the campaign for Karura Forest. The truth is that I simply did not understand why anyone would want to violate the rights of others or to ruin the environment. Why would someone destroy the only forest left in the city and give it to friends and political supporters to build expensive houses and golf courses?

  For me, the destruction of Karura Forest, like the malnourished women in the 1970s, the Times complex in Uhuru Park, and the political prisoners detained without trial, were problems that needed to be solved, and the authorities were stopping me from finding a solution. What people see as fearlessness is really persistence. Because I am focused on the solution, I don't see danger. Because I don't see danger, I don't allow my mind to imagine what might happen to me, which is my definition of fear. If you don't foresee the danger and see only the solution, then you can defy anyone and appear strong and fearless.

  This is not to say we were reckless. We found ways to protect ourselves. When we were confronted with a tense situation, we would sing about the need to protect the forest, and dance. This was a way to disarm the armed men in front of us—and it worked. We could see their frowns and scowls vanish and their faces soften. We were only women singing and dancing, after all, and those things didn't pose a threat. As far as they were concerned, we could sing and dance all day! What they didn't know is that the singing and dancing made us feel strong. It also ensured that nobody got hurt.

  In the end, what was important was that we showed we were not intimidated. We were in the right and had stood up for what we believed in. We were making a statement that this was a public forest and no houses should be built there. To put a gate and fence and guards around public land to stop us entering was to interfere with our right of access. And how did we register our protest? Well, you can talk all day about how something is wrong, but how do you tell a government in this situation that it is violating your rights? Our answer was to plant trees. Today, that beautiful forest is still there, helping Nairobi breathe, and more trees are being planted to reseed what was lost and restore its biodiversity and beauty.

  As the Green Belt Movement matured so also did its vision for how to meet the challenges that continued to unfold. We had already achieved great success with individual farmers planting trees on their own land and meeting the needs that they had envisaged more than twenty years previously for firewood, fencing material, fodder, and food. Even as we continued supporting Green Belt groups to plant trees on their individual plots, the experience of Karura and other forests clearly demonstrated the importance of including public lands within our scope of activities. These need to be retained for the people, protected from privatization and encroachment, and their biodiversity preserved, especially when they are catchment areas. From the year 2000, this has continued t
o be the main focus of the Green Belt Movement.

  Women's groups are producing seedlings and planting them in designated degraded parts of many of Kenya's forests in an effort to rehabilitate and restore them to their natural state. In another major shift, this is being done as a partnership between the Kenyan government's department of forests and Green Belt Movement communities living near the forests. This work provides the greatest hope for the conservation and restoration of the five water “towers” in Kenya—Mount Kenya, the Aberdares, the Mau complex, the Cherangani hills, and Mount Elgon—that control the country's water systems. This includes the flow of rivers, rainfall patterns, and ground-water, all of which are necessary for agriculture, hydropower, people's daily needs, and the wildlife that are at the heart of Kenya's tourism industry.

  This initiative of the Green Belt Movement has also inspired greater awareness of the need to protect other forest ecosystems in Africa that are under threat, especially the Congo Basin Forest. The Congo and Amazon forest ecosystems are two of the most important “lungs” of planet Earth.

  In 2000, I suffered the greatest personal loss I have had so far: My mother died on March 8, International Women's Day, aged ninety-four. I found it poignant that she died on the day women around the world celebrate their solidarity. My mother had come to live with me in the late 1990s, when she became ill. I took great joy in looking after her. Throughout the years she had always supported everything I did. I'm not sure she always understood why I wanted to put my life on the line and she probably worried about me, but I am glad she lived to see what I managed to achieve.

  My mother continued to work well into her eighties. Her life in the country became a little easier. While her house never received electricity, running water arrived during the 1960s and this meant she no longer had to go to the river to fetch it. While my mother was happy to come to live with me in Nairobi at my house in South C, she always wanted to go home to Ihithe, to her farm and the tree nursery she managed for the Green Belt Movement. I did take her home once, but she became unwell the next day, so I had to bring her back to the city. Later, we would drive to her homestead to have a look. What I find amazing was that she never thought she was dying. She believed she was going to get well and go home again to tend to her tree seedlings and food crops.

  She fought to the end. Even in her last years in Nairobi, she mixed herbs and bark from Ihithe in traditional preparations that seemed to give her energy. She walked, even when it was nearly impossible, and would sit in the wheelchair I bought for her only when she became very tired. She was operated on in her late eighties, but her digestive system was weak and she wasn't getting enough energy. Eventually her muscles, and then her body, gave out. I had taken her to the hospital because she was dehydrated, and she came down with pneumonia. I felt terrible, because one part of me was saying, “Take her back home,” while the other said, “But you're not a doctor.” I have always regretted that she slipped away in the hospital while I was away from her deathbed.

  My sister Beatrice Wachatha and I accompanied my mother's body in the car to Nyeri and passed by her house, which she had built in the 1960s. My hand rested on her coffin the whole journey. “This is it,” I kept thinking. “I will never see her again.” We buried her in the homestead. I couldn't bear to see the coffin disappearing into the ground, and walked away. The next day, the whole family gathered at the grave and we planted flowers and a tree. My sister Monica died a couple of years later and was buried next to our mother. I haven't yet gone back to the grave site. It is still too painful. But I hear the tree has grown tall and reminds visitors that there lies a loving mother of mine.

  By the time of my mother's death, I had already lost my father (in 1978, aged seventy-five), my brother, and some friends. But when she passed away, I was more upset than I have ever been in my life. Afterward, I wasn't able to look at her picture or enter her room for a long time. It is a consolation that she died knowing my children were doing well. They phoned her often when they were in America and Muta was able to spend time with her when he returned to Kenya before resuming his graduate studies in the United States. I will never forget the many wonderful evenings my mother and I shared, sitting in her room and talking. My mother is a forever friend.

  My mother was certainly not an environmentalist in the way we would understand the concept today, but she knew the beauty of nature when she saw it and how it made her feel. My mother told me a story of when she was a young woman. She used to walk through the forests from Nyeri to Naivasha on the western side of the Aberdare range. As she walked, she crossed numerous tributaries of the Gura River, which I could hear from our house in Ihithe when I was a child. The Gura and all the other tributaries, known collectively as Magura, flowed down the Aberdares, and my mother told me they were teeming with trout. Kikuyus didn't eat fish at that time, so there was no fishing. But she and her friends would rest by the streams, watch the trout, and marvel at how beautiful they were.

  My mother is gone, as are many of those rivers, and with them the trout and a way of life that knew and honored the abundance of the natural world. Now, because of the devastation of the hillsides, instead of rivers there are only little streams and the Gura River no longer roars. Its waters don't run over the stones so much as seep into the riverbed, and even when I stand next to it, the river says nothing … its roar has slowly been silenced.

  As my people would traditionally say: Arokoma kuuraga, “May she sleep where it rains.” For me, that place is wet with morning dew and is therefore green. Well, perhaps heaven is green.

  13

  Rise Up and Walk

  By 2000, I had been working to address the consequences of poverty in Kenya through a holistic approach to development for twenty-five years. Poverty was not only the result of bad governance and environmental mismanagement, but also an outcome of the global economic system, one of the key realities of which, for poor countries, was crippling debts. As the new millennium approached, a small group of advocates consolidated the campaign for debt cancellation and tied it to the year 2000 being a “Jubilee” year, like all years that end in “50” or “00.” The tradition of the Jubilee year comes from the Bible, which says that every fifty years people should let their fields lie fallow, pray, celebrate God's bounty, forgive any outstanding debts, and let the slaves go free.

  The call for rich countries to cancel the debts owed to them by poor countries became a global campaign. Many of these loans had been advanced to leaders of developing countries who were often known by the lenders of private banks and the World Bank to be corrupt. Not surprisingly, many of these leaders and their cronies in government had not spent the money to benefit their people through health care, education, employment creation, or environmental restoration. Instead, much of the money had been sent out of the country back to bank accounts in the industrialized nations. I had seen the effects of such corruption and poor governance all too often in Kenya, especially through deepening poverty and increasing insecurity. It was estimated that in 1999, Kenya spent $2 billion (U.S.) simply on servicing its debt to the rich countries.

  In 1998, I became cochair of the Jubilee 2000 Africa campaign. Through a network of individuals and groups across the continent, we worked to gather one million signatures on petitions calling on the world's richest countries to cancel Third World debts in 2000. To me, the campaign's greatest opportunity lay in educating ordinary Africans about how the debts were incurred and what their relationship was to good or bad governance. The Green Belt Movement cofounded the Kenyan Debt Relief Network (KENDREN) as an umbrella organization for groups concerned about the effects of our international debts. Besides the Green Belt Movement its members included the Kenya Human Rights Commission, other civil society organizations, and church bodies such as the Catholic Church's Peace and Justice Department. As in many countries, members of the clergy in Kenya were very active in the Jubilee campaign.

  Despite the fact that we were advocating for the dropping of the deb
t to benefit all Kenyans, our government didn't value our efforts. In fact, the police violently broke up one of the marches we held in Nairobi in April 2000. Several hundred of us were walking to the office of the World Bank to deliver a letter to its representative in Kenya calling for the debt to be canceled. Just before we arrived at the bank's office, the police rushed into the crowd with clubs and tear gas and pushed nearly sixty of the marchers into waiting police vans. They then arrested them for participating in an “illegal assembly,” and locked them in police holding cells.

  While I was part of the protest that day, I had stopped to talk with some colleagues and by the time I began walking again, the rest of the marchers were out of sight. I rushed to catch up, but my knees wouldn't let me run very fast. When I arrived, the march had been broken up and the vans were on their way to the police station. It broke my heart to hear from some marchers still left at the scene, as they wiped tear gas from their eyes, that thirteen nuns and two priests had been arrested along with members of the Green Belt Movement, students, and others.

  I hurried to Nairobi's central police station and was furious to see members of the clergy, many of them elderly, locked in those filthy, cold cells. It was the first time any of us could remember that the government had gone so far as to jail nuns and priests. We alerted the international Jubilee 2000 network, which called on its supporters to fax letters of protest to the Kenyan government. Ann Pettifor, then head of the Jubilee 2000 campaign, sent a letter to Kenya's attorney general expressing her deep concern about the arrests. Even the World Bank representative called for the marchers to be released.