It took more than ten years, but planting trees has finally made Wangari Maathai a fugitive in her own country, Kenya. At the Jane Addams Conference at the Hilton and Towers on May 18, the founder of Kenya’s Greenbelt Movement received two standing ovations as well as the Jane Addams International Women’s Leadership Award. But at home she hasn’t slept two nights in the same place since February. Those who shelter her don’t know where she’s going next.
“Our teacher has been reading to us about you and your work,” said one third-grader. “Are you very lucky to be alive?” “Yes,” Maathai answered. For once her thousand-watt smile was not in evidence. “But I feel I must fight until people are free.”
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When Maathai visited Chicago in the fall of 1990 Mayor Daley proclaimed a day in her honor. She has been on MacNeil/Lehrer and Race to Save the Planet. Her idea–organize poor women, who do most of the farm work in Kenya, to plant trees and pay them for it–has also gotten her a chapter in the new book Eco-Heroes and a cameo in Vice President Gore’s best-seller Earth in the Balance. The movement, Gore writes, “combines tree planting with an educational program for women about birth control. Most of the seven million trees planted by the women in Maathai’s movement have survived because a planter receives the small compensation for each seedling planted only after it has been sufficiently nurtured and protected to have an excellent chance of surviving on its own.”
Kenya exists because 19th-century British colonial administrators wanted to ensure control over Egypt and the Suez Canal. They built a railroad from the Indian Ocean to the headwaters of the Nile River in Uganda, and the land along that railroad corridor became Kenya. Maathai was born in 1940 (long before independence) in the countryside north of Nairobi, within sight of Mount Kenya. As a girl she hauled water, collected firewood, and helped cultivate fields. Sometimes her family didn’t have enough food to go around. She remembers seeing a “miracle” when she entered school at age six: the teacher writing and erasing on the blackboard. To her, being able to erase what you had said was even more amazing than writing.
Maathai’s husband ran for parliament in 1974. She took time off to help his campaign, but what she heard at the public rallies made her uncomfortable. “We promised the people jobs, but I knew there were none. I thought we were telling lies. I thought, well, if there are no jobs, perhaps we should create some.”
The program, which now involves 50,000 tree planters, proved so popular that in the middle 1980s the government, under President Daniel arap Moi, paid the Greenbelt Movement the ultimate compliment–imitation. “We were very lucky,” says Maathai. “In the beginning they ignored us. By the time they discovered us we were like our trees–growing and very happy. There are communities today that provide their own firewood and have stopped the dust.”
“That was when people realized that this movement had other powers, the kind that President Moi and the politicians are afraid of. But it is difficult to criticize the movement as a movement–so he criticizes me as a person. He says I’m using the Greenbelt Movement as an antigovernment force.”
