Dr. Wangari Maathai Plants a Forest

by Rebel Girls

  “Of course, Mother,” Wangari said, dropping her bag and heading to the sink. Of all the teachers at Loreto, she liked Mother Teresia best. She was smart, funny, feisty, and unendingly patient. Wangari had spent many free periods in the science teacher’s classroom, helping clean lab equipment and talking with Mother Teresia about science, chemistry, and biology. Wangari had always loved the natural world. Mother Teresia helped her understand the beauty the naked eye couldn’t see. She had taught Wangari that chemical equations and the elements on the periodic table weren’t just drawings on a page. They were the building blocks of life—from the smallest tadpole to the tallest tree.

  “Have you given any more thought to your plans after graduation?”

  “It depends on how I do on my exams,” Wangari said, rubbing a cleaning cloth along the rim of a glass beaker.

  “We both know you will do well.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Wangari said. “And if I succeed…” Wangari took a deep breath, as if about to confess a secret. “Mother Teresia, I want to go to university. Makerere University in Uganda. It’s the only one in East Africa.”

  Not many girls in Kenya even finished high school. To dream of university felt so bold. Mother Teresia, though, seem unfazed.

  “Yes, you must. With a mind like yours, there is no question about that,” Mother Teresia said. “The question is: would you consider going a bit farther?”

  She went to her desk and opened a folder. “The United States government is offering college scholarships to students in Africa. We have been asked to nominate our best graduates. I think you should apply.”

  “America!” Wangari said, flipping through the papers. “I’ve never been farther than Nairobi.”

  “Well, then—this would be quite the adventure, wouldn’t it?” Mother Teresia said. “The world is changing, Wangari. Why not change with it?”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  From the window of the plane, Wangari looked down at a golden expanse so large that it never seemed to end. She had read about the Sahara Desert, of course, but nothing prepared her for the sight of it from the sky.

  The journey would take days: Kenya to Libya to Luxembourg to Iceland to Canada to New York City. And then, at last (Wangari checked her itinerary again, though she practically knew it by heart), to Atchison, Kansas, a little dot squarely in the middle of America.

  Wangari had been thrilled to get her acceptance letter, and even happier to find that Makena was accepted to the same all-women’s university: Mount St. Scholastica. Wangari looked down fondly at her friend, who snored in the seat next to her with her head on Wangari’s shoulder. Makena was drooling. Wangari left her friend to sleep and turned her attention back to the window.

  The plane rumbled across the sky toward a sun that never seemed to set. She thought back to the first time she had left home with Nderitu, how even walking the small footbridge outside their village had seemed like crossing the sea. And now here she was, twenty years old, with the whole ocean ahead of her.

  * * *

  In New York, Wangari, Makena, and the other Kenyan students boarded a Greyhound bus that would take them to their universities. Wangari marveled at mile upon mile of corn along the highway, enough to feed every person in Ihithe for years. By the time they reached Indiana, everyone on the bus was tired, hungry, and ready for a break.

  “Cold drinks!” Makena shouted, pointing to a highway sign. Wangari sighed in relief— Makena’s talent for finding snacks apparently worked anywhere in the world.

  They tumbled from the bus, grateful for the fresh air and the chance to stretch their legs. The café wasn’t that crowded, but Wangari noticed some strange looks from the seated customers. They must be tired from their travels, she thought.

  “Ahem,” said a voice. They turned around to face a man in a white paper server’s cap.

  “I have to ask you to leave,” he said, his eyes never quite meeting her own. “If you’re thirsty, you can buy a drink up front. You just have to drink it outside.”

  “Why?” Makena asked in confusion.

  “We don’t serve your kind here.”

  Wangari felt like she’d been struck. She could not believe what she was hearing. Suddenly, she realized that all the faces in the café were white.

  The customers nearby fell silent.

  “What should we do, Wangari?” Makena whispered.

  Wangari could feel her friends looking to her for an answer. She had never been in a situation like this. At school and at home, she had been raised to follow the rules. But she also knew that some rules should be broken.

  “We have no use for a place that will not treat us as equals,” Wangari said, her voice sure and strong. She turned around, and her friends went with her. They walked out with their heads held high.

  The bus was quiet after that. Wangari suspected the others were as shaken as she was.

  Growing up in Kenya, Wangari had seen how towns and cities were divided into separate areas based on people’s skin color. White children and black children didn’t go to school together. Even the nuns at St. Cecilia’s ran a separate school that only white girls were allowed to attend. They never talked in school about whether this was fair or not. It was just the way it was.

  The white people who moved to Kenya often lived in big houses on the best land. The neighborhoods reserved for black people were crowded and farther from roads or water. White farmers were allowed to own land, chop down any trees they wanted, and grow crops that could be sold for lots of money, like tea and coffee. Black farmers had no choice but to work on white people’s farms. Wangari’s own father worked on a British settler’s farm, one far away from Ihithe. It was the only way he could earn enough to support their family. She hardly ever saw him.

  Yet Wangari could not remember a time when she felt prejudice directed at her as it was in that diner. People had warned her that there were places in America where she would not be welcome, but she hadn’t really believed it. This was 1960. America called itself “the land of the free.” It had the fastest cars and the highest buildings. How could it be so backward in its thinking about the color of people’s skin?

  By the time she and Makena arrived in Atchison, her worry had hardened into a knot in her stomach. A dark-haired young woman with white skin noticed them and walked quickly in their direction. Wangari took a deep breath and stood as tall as she could.

  The young woman smiled broadly and held out her hand. “Wangari? Makena? What a pleasure to meet you. I’m Florence. Welcome to Mount St. Scholastica!”

  Wangari relaxed, and she reached out to shake hands with her first American friend.

  * * *

  Wangari made a lot of wonderful memories with her friends in America. Kenya was too far away for her to travel home during school breaks, so Wangari spent holidays and long weekends with Florence at her family’s house where they baked chocolate chip cookies, danced along with American Bandstand on television, and stayed up late laughing and talking.

  She also loved watching the seasons change. In the springtime Wangari left early for classes so she could walk slowly and admire the latest buds and seedlings sprouting from the naked branches and damp earth. Wangari majored, of course, in biology—the study of living things. Over the summer breaks, she worked at laboratories to get the skills she’d need to become a scientist.

  There was a lot to learn outside the lab, too.

  America was changing all around her. Black people were tired of the kind of discrimination Wangari and her friends experienced when they first arrived. To fight it, they sometimes refused to go to businesses that treated black and white customers differently. In other cases, hundreds or even thousands of people marched through American cities together to protest unfair treatment. Sometimes people screamed nasty things at them. Sometimes they were even arrested and thrown in jail.

  But they never gave up. Wangari was amazed by the marchers’ courage.

  Wangari often thought about her home. Why do white p
eople in Kenya have more say over the land than black people? Why is it all right for British settlers to decide to cut down trees that have stood for centuries? Kenya was a British colony—a part of the world Britain controlled as if it was part of their own country, no matter how far away it was. There had been ugly fights between the British and the Kenyans who wanted to rebel against their control. She tried to imagine the streets of Nairobi filled with people marching together, but she couldn’t. It was exciting to see people in America speaking up about the problems in their country now—and trying to fix them.

  She was startled from her thoughts by pounding on her apartment door. “Open up, Wangari!” a familiar voice cried out. As soon as she did, a breathless Makena came in.

  “I have been looking everywhere for you!” Makena paused to catch her breath. “We have news. From home. Kenya is going to be independent. Look!” Makena smoothed a folded newspaper onto the kitchen table. “My eldest sister sent this to me, special delivery. There will be elections in May for the new leaders who will take over when the British leave. By the end of the year, Kenya will be its own country!”

  Wangari looked at the newspaper, stunned. For as long as she’d been alive, Kenya had belonged to Britain. Now it would be its own country. For the first time, Kenyans would decide for themselves how to run their country. Kenyans would have the right to decide what was fair and what wasn’t, to protect their land and rights, just as she saw people in America doing.

  Wangari wanted to see this new country right away, but there was also more she wanted to learn. She had already agreed to attend the University of Pittsburgh after she graduated from Mount St. Scholastica. As she and Makena hugged each other, Wangari knew that one day she would return home to a free Kenya. She was excited to see what that would mean.

  CHAPTER SIX

  As soon as she stepped off the plane in Nairobi, Wangari felt at home. The warm, dry air that wrapped around her like a hug was nothing like the snow she’d left behind in Pennsylvania. It had been six years since she’d set foot in Kenya, and the city seemed to buzz with more people, more energy, and more excitement than she remembered.

  “Wangari!” cried a tall young man with a familiar face. Instantly Wangari saw the people behind him, all waving and leaping with joy: her mother, her siblings—even her father had come out from the farm.

  “Nderitu!” she said, throwing her arms around her brother. “Look at you!”

  He laughed. “Don’t you recognize your baby brother? I’m Kamunya. That’s Nderitu!” he said. Their elder brother approached, laughing, holding the hand of a smiling young woman. Wangari recognized her from the photographs he’d sent of his wife, Elizabeth.

  “How on earth did you grow this tall?” Wangari said to her brothers. “What else has changed while I was gone?”

  Nderitu put his arm around her shoulders. “Everything, sis. Now hand me those bags.”

  * * *

  Wangari didn’t have to worry about finding a place to live. Nderitu and Elizabeth invited her to stay with them in their small house in Nairobi. She didn’t have to worry about finding work, either. The University of Nairobi was looking for a person with exactly the skills she’d picked up at her summer jobs. She could work there as a teacher and research assistant while also taking classes for her doctorate degree.

  But not everything went smoothly. Her male students didn’t believe that a woman, especially one as young as Wangari, could teach them anything. Wangari thought about the best teachers she’d ever had—including Mother Teresia and her mother. They had always spoken to her one-on-one. So that’s what Wangari decided to do with her students. As they worked through the lab exercises, she walked around the room, pausing to guide them through any problems. People were more willing to listen if you took the time to connect with them, she found, rather than just telling them what to do. She might look different from the teachers they were used to, Wangari told herself, but her students would get used to it. This was a new Kenya.

  Life at home was different, too. In 1969, she married a man named Mwangi Mathai. He was a good husband—quiet and serious, and he worked in politics. They lived in Nairobi and soon had a son, Waweru, a daughter, Wanjira, and then another son, Muta. Mwangi sometimes got annoyed when Wangari worked late instead of hosting dinners like other politicians’ wives, but Wangari didn’t let it bother her too much.

  In 1971, after years of studying, Wangari got her doctorate degree—the first woman in East or Central Africa to do so. Wangari was pregnant with Wanjira when she put on a long black robe and squishy cap and walked across the stage to receive her diploma.

  She was Dr. Wangari Mathai now.

  * * *

  Not all the changes happening in Kenya were good ones. Wangari looked eagerly out the car window as they bumped along the dusty road from Nairobi to Ihithe. It was 1973 and she hadn’t been to the village in years. She couldn’t wait to see it again.

  “Are you certain we’re going the right way?” she asked the driver.

  This didn’t look like the road to her village. There were broad, dusty patches where groves of tall trees had once stood; they had been torn away to make room for coffee plantations. The stream running along the road, which used to be clear and clean, was a river of mud.

  Soil erosion, Wangari thought. Tree roots hold soil in place. Whoever had cut down the trees hadn’t realized that. Now the rivers that used to provide fresh water were impossible to drink from.

  The car pulled into Ihithe, and Wangari’s face fell. The same mud-walled houses stood in the same places, but everything else was wrong. The cows outside the houses were so skinny she could count their ribs. The sun beat down on dry earth that was stripped of grass and bushes. Even the people looked thinner.

  She found her mother outside her hut mending a basket.

  Wanjirũ looked up. She was happy to see her daughter, but her eyes were lined with sorrow. She saw the worry in Wangari’s face as well.

  “Come,” she said. “It’s worse than you think.”

  They walked down the hill where Wangari and her siblings had once gone mud-skiing.

  “Children can’t play here during the rainy season anymore,” Maitũ explained. “There have been too many landslides.”

  When they reached the top of the valley, Wangari gasped. The land where the forest used to be was now bare, cracked, and brown.

  “They cut it down,” Maitũ said with a soft sigh. “Farmers thought they’d make more money if they grew tea and coffee to sell. The truth is, it’s made us all poorer. We have to walk so far to find firewood and clean water.”

  Wangari knelt down and scooped up a handful of dirt. It was nothing like the rich earth she’d touched as a child.

  Maitũ continued. “The crops don’t grow as well as they used to, and most of the old fruit trees are gone. The money from the crops doesn’t come to us, either. It goes to people who are rich already. And instead of eating what we grow, we have to buy food at the market.”

  When they came to the bottom of the hill, Wangari stopped in her tracks. Her eyes filled with tears. The mugumo, her wild fig tree, was gone. The arrowroots and the stream were gone, too. Where the tree had once stood was a patch of empty dirt.

  “A big man bought this piece of land,” Maitũ said sadly. “He thought he’d make a lot of money by planting tea trees. He said the fig tree would just be in the way, so he cut it down. But once the tree was gone, the stream dried up. Now nothing can grow here. That man killed our tree for nothing.” Her voice sounded bitter. “People stopped listening. They stopped respecting the land. And now we’re all paying for it.”

  * * *

  Wangari did not go straight back to Nairobi. Instead, she directed the driver to other rural villages, places where her school friends and cousins lived. The story was the same everywhere. Healthy trees and grassland had been replaced by non-native trees that didn’t hold the soil. Rivers were muddy. Dust blew all over.

  Wangari knew something ha
d to be done.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Wangari was part of a group called the National Council of Women of Kenya—NCWK for short. It was made up of women across the country who wanted to help Kenya and their communities. She knew that if any group of people could figure out how to fix the problems in the countryside, this would be the one.

  One Saturday, they squeezed into the tiny office that housed their many projects. A tower of papers began to topple, but Wangari caught it just before it fell. Another woman looked for a place to put a stack of books. Finding none, she set them in her lap with a sigh.

  Wangari described what she had seen in Ihithe. Most had heard similar things from relatives around the country.

  “We have to do something,” a woman named Vertistine said with a decisive nod.

  Vertistine was also a science professor at the University of Nairobi and one of Wangari’s closest friends. She went by the nickname Vert. She was a black American woman who had moved to Nairobi with her Kenyan husband, and she spoke in an honest way that Wangari liked.

  “I always ask my students, ‘What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?’ ” Vert said. “Let’s do that here. What’s the real problem facing these communities?”

  “Is it that they don’t have enough money?” someone said.

  “The villages have always been poor, but never like this,” said another woman.

  “Should we donate food?”

  “No, we should raise money.”

  While the women debated, Wangari’s mind was working. The people and animals were sick because they didn’t have enough food. They didn’t have enough food because the land was not healthy, and the land had gone bad because the streams had dried up. And all that had started when they chopped down the trees.