The Giving Tree
Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai proves the link between planting, peace, and prosperity
Vogue
February 18, 2005
Wangari Maathai signing books after speaking in the Great Hall of Cooper Union in New York City, March 8, 2005. Photo by Juliana Thomas.
“This is Nairobi,” writes Binyavanga Wainaina (one of Kenya’s best restless young writers). “This is what you do to get ahead: make yourself boneless, and treat your straitjacket as if it were a game, a challenge.”
East Africa’s largest single slum, Kibera, swells along Nairobi’s edge, nudging clusters of smaller slums. Every day a crush of minibuses, wheelbarrows, bikes, and pedestrians ferries into the city from the surrounding shanties, and the business of life is negotiated under layers of red dust, the cracking wings of the scavenging marabou storks and the mocking shrieks of the Hadada ibises (“Ha-da-da!” they call, like the ghosts of so many tipsy memsahibs). There is a metallic aftertaste of brutality in the air—a hangover from two decades of political violence from which Kenya has only just pulled itself.
This is the home of Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, whose genius cannot be fully appreciated without reference to her country’s history or her ethnicity any more than, say, Nelson Mandela’s peculiar brand of bravery can be understood without reference to South Africa’s history and his skin color. For the last 20 years, until the democratic elections in 2002, Kenya has been wrecked by the kind of “ethnic clashes” that the rest of the world tends to ignore until they spiral into genocide (Rwanda, 1994; Sudan, 2004). Simply put, Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s dictator from 1978 to 2002, is a Kalenjin. The largest ethnic group in Kenya is Kikuyu; Maathai herself is Kikuyu. Using this fact to his political advantage, Moi sent “Kalenjin warriors” (actually government-sponsored thugs) to intimidate and kill his opposition, who were mostly Kikuyu. From 1991 to 1995 more than 1,500 people were killed and over 300,000 were displaced while Moi tried to prove to Kenyans and the rest of the world that multiparty politics was not suitable for a multiethnic country like Kenya.
Maathai, the first African woman to receive a Nobel, is a human-rights activist and environmentalist who ingeniously used an environmental campaign to oppose Moi’s regime and agitate for democratic elections. She recognized (and so, in a more sinister way, did Moi) that a hungry population in a country whose land was a growing desert would not have the energy to oppose a corrupt dictatorship. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has pointed out that there has never been a famine in a democracy. It follows that there cannot be a democracy where there is famine.
“If you cut one tree, plant two,” Maathai instructed.
One billowy afternoon late last November, I made myself boneless, slipped into a straitjacket, and crossed the center of Nairobi to reach the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources to interview Maathai (she is now assistant minister of the environment as well as a member of parliament for her home constituency in the Aberdare Mountains, north of the capital). Traffic was thick, which gave me time to look around and reflect that, even on a constrained budget, Nairobi has managed to produce some impressively ugly architecture.
I blame Daniel arap Moi for this anti-inspiration. Moi spent 20 million shillings (my taxi driver remembered the figure like a freshly delivered insult), or about $260,000, on a disgusting monument to himself right plunk in the middle of Nairobi’s Central Park. It’s a shiny black-granite pyramid with an enormous rendition of Moi’s fist clutching the end of a torch, which erupts obscenely from the top. Compare and contrast over the road in Uhuru Park a modest white sign erected by Wangari Maathai that announces, GREEN BELT MOVEMENT—LEST WE FORGET…. TREES FOR PEACE and behind the sign 20 or so trees planted in memory of those who died in detention or street riots protesting Moi’s tenure. There is something simple and moving about the trees for peace—brave, spindly things defiant against the roar of city chaos and pollution. I asked the taxi driver to pull over so that I could take their photograph.
“What do you think of Wangari Maathai?” I asked him.
“She has made all of Kenya proud,” he replied. “Imagine! She has brought us peace, and now she should be the most celebrated woman in the world.”
I didn’t want to burst his bubble by adding, “Well, kind of.”
The international response to the announcement of the 2004 Peace Prize has been somewhat muted. Hardly anyone has understood why Maathai, widely thought to be little more than a gutsy environmentalist, should win the Nobel Peace Prize when there is a real war going on elsewhere. Which misses the point of Maathai—she did not win the award for planting trees. She won the award “for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace.” Planting trees was only one example of her work to oppose Moi’s murderous regime. More serious controversy has been spawned by comments Maathai allegedly made claiming that AIDS is a biological weapon cooked up in Western laboratories to kill of blacks. Subsequently she has repeatedly asserted that what she has said about the epidemic has been taken out of context and that she was simply acknowledging that there are different theories about the origin of the AIDS virus, including one speculating it was created in a lab.
It was shortly after noon when the taxi deposited me at the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources. It is a cavernous building, more or less dissolving to the sigh of humid curtains and the placid peeling of official-green paint. I followed an incongruous crescendo of flower arrangements and potted plants up stairwells and down corridors until I arrived at a door on the fourth floor bearing Maathai’s name. Now the house plants and roses were everywhere, on the floor and desks and side tables (a rebellious insistence on beauty in the face of discouraging odds seems to be Maathai’s signature statement as well as her driving philosophy).
“Come in. Have some tea,” Maathai offered when I was ushered into her office. “Please sit down.” She gestured to an armchair in front of a small coffee table, and my legs folded obediently under me. She smiled (the word for what it is like to be struck by the radiant force of the trademark Maathai-beam has not yet been invented) and sat down next to me. Somehow, Maathai was not what I expected. I had imagined a strident activist with edges made angrily sharp by years of challenge. But Maathai is both astonishingly beautiful and refreshingly built in a withstanding sort of way, the kind of gently robust person you’d hope to find yourself next to in a crisis. Her habitual costume is simple—a traditional dress with a matching scarf stiffly arranged into a knot in the front of her head (today she was in blue, although she is most famous for dressing in sunflower-yellow, in defiance of global pessimism).
My immediate impression was of a female Nelson Mandela. Such is Mandela’s charisma and charm that it is famously recounted that his prison guards on Robben Island had to be changed every three months because they kept falling in love with apartheid’s most famous rebel. Maathai has that same soul-divining aura, as if, with her first look, she had decided to skip the common-or-garden preliminaries of discourse and jump straight to a place of compassionate curiosity. She wore no makeup or jewelry, and although she’s over 60 the fact of her age seemed puzzlingly irrelevant until I remembered that souls are difficult to date and it is soul that Maathai emanates, not flesh.
“I remember,” Maathai told me (she has a deep and resonant voice, as it dust-coated), “the shock of coming back home from the U.S. and finding the countryside changed.” This was in the mid-sixties: Trees had gone, the rivers were running dirty, and women were complaining—they had no firewood, the water was not clean, the rain was not coming. That was when Maathai had the idea to plant trees. “If you have a problem,” she says often, “you will find that you also have the solution to your problem.” When I asked about the difficulty of implementing this philosophy during the Moi years, Maathai shrugged off her acts of courage (she received numerous death threats both directly and indirectly from Moi’s government, and in March 1992 she was beaten unconscious by riot police when demonstrating in Nairobi for the release of political prisoners). “Whatever you are planning, you can’t project fear or failure,” she told me. “Whatever you project is what you will achieve,” and then she beamed at me, as if it really were that simple.
Wangari Maathai—born and educated in the highlands of Kenya—was a beneficiary of the “Kennedy Airlift,” an inspired American initiative of the early sixties that arranged for East Africa’s most motivated scholars to be sent to university in the United States. Maathai returned to Kenya in 1966, having earned a degree in biological sciences from Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, and a master of science degree from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1971, she got her Ph.D. from the University of Nairobi, becoming the first woman in East and Central Africa to have a doctorate. She became the University of Nairobi’s first woman professor, in the department of veterinary anatomy (the study of animal physiology rather than animal health). “Everyone,” she has joked, “thought I was a vet. So when their cat got sick, they brought it to me.”
In the mid-seventies, Maathai left academic life and founded the Green Belt Movement, Kenya’s most famous environmental and human rights-campaigning group, acting not only to save Kenya’s forests but also in behalf of victims of “ethnic clashes.” At its height, the GBM mobilized more than 100,000 women to form tree-nursery groups (the women earned $1 for every fifteen trees they planted, which was, in many cases, their only income); 30 million trees were planted across the country for fuel, building, shade, food, and soil protection on both private land and degraded forests; women were shown how to plant drought-resistant indigenous crops to feed their families. These networks gave rural African women gifts that no one else had thought to give them—freedom from imprisoning hunger, a sense of secure community, and the reassurance that their agricultural instincts were correct. (“You don’t need a diploma to dig a hole and plant a tree,” Maathai says, calling the women “foresters without diplomas.”) In the process, Maathai emphasized the importance of freedom, “starting with my own personal freedom” and ending with political freedom and a personal and political voice for everyone.
“The thing is,” she told me now, “whatever I did, I was very careful not to break a law. When you are rubbing powerful people the wrong way, it is important to stand by your values.”
Among her influences, Maathai cited the Consolata missionaries at her secondary school in Kenya and the Benedictine nuns who taught her in Kansas. “They instilled in me a powerful sense of service and taught me not to be materialistic. They taught us that instead of worrying about what you can possess, you should worry about what you can’t possess.” By which Maathai means the air we breathe, the soil beneath our feet, and the water that runs through our bodies, without which we are nothing.
My time with Wangari Maathai was all too brief, but I came blinking out of the dingy building and into the bright reproach of a sun-swelled early afternoon, feeling as if I had been given new eyes and an awakened soul. After all, to exude a sense of empowered peace in a country where there are yoga centers on every corner is one thing; to pull this off in Nairobi is its own small miracle. To pull it off with historic brilliance and heroism while raising three children as a single mother in a country hostile to strong women is almost unimaginable. (Maathai and her husband—with whom she is now on good terms and who played an active role in their children’s lives—split in the early eighties. He was awarded a divorce on the grounds that she was “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn, and too hard to control.”)
Back on the street, my taxi driver was waiting for me. “You’re right,” I said as I climbed into the passenger seat. “She should be the most celebrated woman in the world right now.”
In an hour’s time Maathai was slated to plant a tree (even though “I never,” she said, “plant only one tree”) on the grounds of the university and then to deliver a speech in the main hall. We hurried back across Nairobi to ensure ourselves a place in the crowd.
“You are not supposed to dress up when you go to work,” Maathai told the men in suits who flanked her as she sank to her knees and lowered the tree into the ground, slipping the plastic pocket off its roots like a midwife delivering life. Everyone standing outside the university library (which houses a statue of Gandhi, appropriately enough) cheered and clapped. You’d have thought no one had seen anyone plant a tree before, although what they were really responding to was the backbone behind her actions, the irreverence, the sly nod to politicians who are famously fat, lazy, and corrupt on this continent. “Thank you,” she said, once the tree was planted, “to all of you who made yourself dirty. That is the only way to plant a tree.”
Then Maathai, like the Pied Piper, led us from the university gardens to the hall where she sailed to the pulpit on the main stage, put down her sheaf of notes (which she never looked at again), and smiled at us. And then she began to talk, as an African, to Africans, and along with everyone else in that crowd that moist afternoon I found myself carried along by her words.
“If you don’t face a challenge,” she told the audience (every seat was filled; there were bodies pressed into the spaces between the doors, against the windows), “then nothing really is happening in your life!” (We bellowed with agreement.) “Don’t you remember how some of you died for freedom?” she asked (tears damped our cheeks). “Women,” she said, “have been forgotten and downtrodden. But it is very, very important that we stand up, walk tall, and be proud of ourselves…like Kenyatta told us ‘Kifua mbele,’ walk with your chest out!” (We doubled over with laughter.) “Women have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of and everything to be proud of,” and then she paused and leveled her gaze at the audience. “As for you men…” she said with a reprimand in her voice (the women in the crowd went wild), “you are expected to give a certain leadership because we don’t have any woman president in Africa.” She paused, and in that moment a loud voice behind me added, “Yet.”
Three days later, I caught up with Maathai near her home in the heart of the Aberdare Mountains, where she had arranged to plant 6,000 trees on ten hectares of deforested hillside. The holes had been dug and the saplings lay limp in the relentless highland sun, encircled by the great-limbed trees of the surviving forest. Maathai arrived in usual pragmatic style and got straight to work.
“Aren’t you afraid the trees will die if it doesn’t rain?” I asked, feeling the sting of the sun on my neck.
“No.” Maathai spoke with the confidence of one who has a direct line to the source of such matters. “It will rain tonight.”
German and American camera crews were also on hand to record the great woman in the act of planting trees. She delighted them by doing nothing else for more than four hours, refusing offers of water or rest and hardly pausing to answer their questions. “I am a child of these mountains. I cannot get tired.”
She left her bodyguards wilting by the side of the road.
“Shouldn’t you be planting trees?” I asked one of them, who, it turned out, had been Moi’s bodyguard ten years ago.
“No, we are protecting the professor.”
“You’re nowhere near her,” I pointed out.
“She moves too quickly,” the bodyguard complained.
It was late afternoon by the time all the trees had been nestled into their red pockets of earth by the 100 or so volunteers from nearby villages. The heat seemed to swing up from the earth as well as pound down unfiltered from the equatorial sky. I thought our efforts could never compete with the African sun. It was dark and I was sunburned and tired as we bumped back into the town of Nyeri, so I did not notice the clouds coming up over the swell of hills from the low-bellied valley. Then the first, startling drops of rain splattered on our windshield followed by made-to-order gentle soaking for freshly planted saplings.
It was obvious. Even the skies obey Wangari Maathai.
East Africa’s largest single slum, Kibera, swells along Nairobi’s edge, nudging clusters of smaller slums. Every day a crush of minibuses, wheelbarrows, bikes, and pedestrians ferries into the city from the surrounding shanties, and the business of life is negotiated under layers of red dust, the cracking wings of the scavenging marabou storks and the mocking shrieks of the Hadada ibises (“Ha-da-da!” they call, like the ghosts of so many tipsy memsahibs). There is a metallic aftertaste of brutality in the air—a hangover from two decades of political violence from which Kenya has only just pulled itself.
This is the home of Wangari Maathai, the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, whose genius cannot be fully appreciated without reference to her country’s history or her ethnicity any more than, say, Nelson Mandela’s peculiar brand of bravery can be understood without reference to South Africa’s history and his skin color. For the last 20 years, until the democratic elections in 2002, Kenya has been wrecked by the kind of “ethnic clashes” that the rest of the world tends to ignore until they spiral into genocide (Rwanda, 1994; Sudan, 2004). Simply put, Daniel arap Moi, Kenya’s dictator from 1978 to 2002, is a Kalenjin. The largest ethnic group in Kenya is Kikuyu; Maathai herself is Kikuyu. Using this fact to his political advantage, Moi sent “Kalenjin warriors” (actually government-sponsored thugs) to intimidate and kill his opposition, who were mostly Kikuyu. From 1991 to 1995 more than 1,500 people were killed and over 300,000 were displaced while Moi tried to prove to Kenyans and the rest of the world that multiparty politics was not suitable for a multiethnic country like Kenya.
Maathai, the first African woman to receive a Nobel, is a human-rights activist and environmentalist who ingeniously used an environmental campaign to oppose Moi’s regime and agitate for democratic elections. She recognized (and so, in a more sinister way, did Moi) that a hungry population in a country whose land was a growing desert would not have the energy to oppose a corrupt dictatorship. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has pointed out that there has never been a famine in a democracy. It follows that there cannot be a democracy where there is famine.
“If you cut one tree, plant two,” Maathai instructed.
One billowy afternoon late last November, I made myself boneless, slipped into a straitjacket, and crossed the center of Nairobi to reach the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources to interview Maathai (she is now assistant minister of the environment as well as a member of parliament for her home constituency in the Aberdare Mountains, north of the capital). Traffic was thick, which gave me time to look around and reflect that, even on a constrained budget, Nairobi has managed to produce some impressively ugly architecture.
I blame Daniel arap Moi for this anti-inspiration. Moi spent 20 million shillings (my taxi driver remembered the figure like a freshly delivered insult), or about $260,000, on a disgusting monument to himself right plunk in the middle of Nairobi’s Central Park. It’s a shiny black-granite pyramid with an enormous rendition of Moi’s fist clutching the end of a torch, which erupts obscenely from the top. Compare and contrast over the road in Uhuru Park a modest white sign erected by Wangari Maathai that announces, GREEN BELT MOVEMENT—LEST WE FORGET…. TREES FOR PEACE and behind the sign 20 or so trees planted in memory of those who died in detention or street riots protesting Moi’s tenure. There is something simple and moving about the trees for peace—brave, spindly things defiant against the roar of city chaos and pollution. I asked the taxi driver to pull over so that I could take their photograph.
“What do you think of Wangari Maathai?” I asked him.
“She has made all of Kenya proud,” he replied. “Imagine! She has brought us peace, and now she should be the most celebrated woman in the world.”
I didn’t want to burst his bubble by adding, “Well, kind of.”
The international response to the announcement of the 2004 Peace Prize has been somewhat muted. Hardly anyone has understood why Maathai, widely thought to be little more than a gutsy environmentalist, should win the Nobel Peace Prize when there is a real war going on elsewhere. Which misses the point of Maathai—she did not win the award for planting trees. She won the award “for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace.” Planting trees was only one example of her work to oppose Moi’s murderous regime. More serious controversy has been spawned by comments Maathai allegedly made claiming that AIDS is a biological weapon cooked up in Western laboratories to kill of blacks. Subsequently she has repeatedly asserted that what she has said about the epidemic has been taken out of context and that she was simply acknowledging that there are different theories about the origin of the AIDS virus, including one speculating it was created in a lab.
It was shortly after noon when the taxi deposited me at the Ministry of the Environment and Natural Resources. It is a cavernous building, more or less dissolving to the sigh of humid curtains and the placid peeling of official-green paint. I followed an incongruous crescendo of flower arrangements and potted plants up stairwells and down corridors until I arrived at a door on the fourth floor bearing Maathai’s name. Now the house plants and roses were everywhere, on the floor and desks and side tables (a rebellious insistence on beauty in the face of discouraging odds seems to be Maathai’s signature statement as well as her driving philosophy).
“Come in. Have some tea,” Maathai offered when I was ushered into her office. “Please sit down.” She gestured to an armchair in front of a small coffee table, and my legs folded obediently under me. She smiled (the word for what it is like to be struck by the radiant force of the trademark Maathai-beam has not yet been invented) and sat down next to me. Somehow, Maathai was not what I expected. I had imagined a strident activist with edges made angrily sharp by years of challenge. But Maathai is both astonishingly beautiful and refreshingly built in a withstanding sort of way, the kind of gently robust person you’d hope to find yourself next to in a crisis. Her habitual costume is simple—a traditional dress with a matching scarf stiffly arranged into a knot in the front of her head (today she was in blue, although she is most famous for dressing in sunflower-yellow, in defiance of global pessimism).
My immediate impression was of a female Nelson Mandela. Such is Mandela’s charisma and charm that it is famously recounted that his prison guards on Robben Island had to be changed every three months because they kept falling in love with apartheid’s most famous rebel. Maathai has that same soul-divining aura, as if, with her first look, she had decided to skip the common-or-garden preliminaries of discourse and jump straight to a place of compassionate curiosity. She wore no makeup or jewelry, and although she’s over 60 the fact of her age seemed puzzlingly irrelevant until I remembered that souls are difficult to date and it is soul that Maathai emanates, not flesh.
“I remember,” Maathai told me (she has a deep and resonant voice, as it dust-coated), “the shock of coming back home from the U.S. and finding the countryside changed.” This was in the mid-sixties: Trees had gone, the rivers were running dirty, and women were complaining—they had no firewood, the water was not clean, the rain was not coming. That was when Maathai had the idea to plant trees. “If you have a problem,” she says often, “you will find that you also have the solution to your problem.” When I asked about the difficulty of implementing this philosophy during the Moi years, Maathai shrugged off her acts of courage (she received numerous death threats both directly and indirectly from Moi’s government, and in March 1992 she was beaten unconscious by riot police when demonstrating in Nairobi for the release of political prisoners). “Whatever you are planning, you can’t project fear or failure,” she told me. “Whatever you project is what you will achieve,” and then she beamed at me, as if it really were that simple.
Wangari Maathai—born and educated in the highlands of Kenya—was a beneficiary of the “Kennedy Airlift,” an inspired American initiative of the early sixties that arranged for East Africa’s most motivated scholars to be sent to university in the United States. Maathai returned to Kenya in 1966, having earned a degree in biological sciences from Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, and a master of science degree from the University of Pittsburgh. In 1971, she got her Ph.D. from the University of Nairobi, becoming the first woman in East and Central Africa to have a doctorate. She became the University of Nairobi’s first woman professor, in the department of veterinary anatomy (the study of animal physiology rather than animal health). “Everyone,” she has joked, “thought I was a vet. So when their cat got sick, they brought it to me.”
In the mid-seventies, Maathai left academic life and founded the Green Belt Movement, Kenya’s most famous environmental and human rights-campaigning group, acting not only to save Kenya’s forests but also in behalf of victims of “ethnic clashes.” At its height, the GBM mobilized more than 100,000 women to form tree-nursery groups (the women earned $1 for every fifteen trees they planted, which was, in many cases, their only income); 30 million trees were planted across the country for fuel, building, shade, food, and soil protection on both private land and degraded forests; women were shown how to plant drought-resistant indigenous crops to feed their families. These networks gave rural African women gifts that no one else had thought to give them—freedom from imprisoning hunger, a sense of secure community, and the reassurance that their agricultural instincts were correct. (“You don’t need a diploma to dig a hole and plant a tree,” Maathai says, calling the women “foresters without diplomas.”) In the process, Maathai emphasized the importance of freedom, “starting with my own personal freedom” and ending with political freedom and a personal and political voice for everyone.
“The thing is,” she told me now, “whatever I did, I was very careful not to break a law. When you are rubbing powerful people the wrong way, it is important to stand by your values.”
Among her influences, Maathai cited the Consolata missionaries at her secondary school in Kenya and the Benedictine nuns who taught her in Kansas. “They instilled in me a powerful sense of service and taught me not to be materialistic. They taught us that instead of worrying about what you can possess, you should worry about what you can’t possess.” By which Maathai means the air we breathe, the soil beneath our feet, and the water that runs through our bodies, without which we are nothing.
My time with Wangari Maathai was all too brief, but I came blinking out of the dingy building and into the bright reproach of a sun-swelled early afternoon, feeling as if I had been given new eyes and an awakened soul. After all, to exude a sense of empowered peace in a country where there are yoga centers on every corner is one thing; to pull this off in Nairobi is its own small miracle. To pull it off with historic brilliance and heroism while raising three children as a single mother in a country hostile to strong women is almost unimaginable. (Maathai and her husband—with whom she is now on good terms and who played an active role in their children’s lives—split in the early eighties. He was awarded a divorce on the grounds that she was “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn, and too hard to control.”)
Back on the street, my taxi driver was waiting for me. “You’re right,” I said as I climbed into the passenger seat. “She should be the most celebrated woman in the world right now.”
In an hour’s time Maathai was slated to plant a tree (even though “I never,” she said, “plant only one tree”) on the grounds of the university and then to deliver a speech in the main hall. We hurried back across Nairobi to ensure ourselves a place in the crowd.
“You are not supposed to dress up when you go to work,” Maathai told the men in suits who flanked her as she sank to her knees and lowered the tree into the ground, slipping the plastic pocket off its roots like a midwife delivering life. Everyone standing outside the university library (which houses a statue of Gandhi, appropriately enough) cheered and clapped. You’d have thought no one had seen anyone plant a tree before, although what they were really responding to was the backbone behind her actions, the irreverence, the sly nod to politicians who are famously fat, lazy, and corrupt on this continent. “Thank you,” she said, once the tree was planted, “to all of you who made yourself dirty. That is the only way to plant a tree.”
Then Maathai, like the Pied Piper, led us from the university gardens to the hall where she sailed to the pulpit on the main stage, put down her sheaf of notes (which she never looked at again), and smiled at us. And then she began to talk, as an African, to Africans, and along with everyone else in that crowd that moist afternoon I found myself carried along by her words.
“If you don’t face a challenge,” she told the audience (every seat was filled; there were bodies pressed into the spaces between the doors, against the windows), “then nothing really is happening in your life!” (We bellowed with agreement.) “Don’t you remember how some of you died for freedom?” she asked (tears damped our cheeks). “Women,” she said, “have been forgotten and downtrodden. But it is very, very important that we stand up, walk tall, and be proud of ourselves…like Kenyatta told us ‘Kifua mbele,’ walk with your chest out!” (We doubled over with laughter.) “Women have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of and everything to be proud of,” and then she paused and leveled her gaze at the audience. “As for you men…” she said with a reprimand in her voice (the women in the crowd went wild), “you are expected to give a certain leadership because we don’t have any woman president in Africa.” She paused, and in that moment a loud voice behind me added, “Yet.”
Three days later, I caught up with Maathai near her home in the heart of the Aberdare Mountains, where she had arranged to plant 6,000 trees on ten hectares of deforested hillside. The holes had been dug and the saplings lay limp in the relentless highland sun, encircled by the great-limbed trees of the surviving forest. Maathai arrived in usual pragmatic style and got straight to work.
“Aren’t you afraid the trees will die if it doesn’t rain?” I asked, feeling the sting of the sun on my neck.
“No.” Maathai spoke with the confidence of one who has a direct line to the source of such matters. “It will rain tonight.”
German and American camera crews were also on hand to record the great woman in the act of planting trees. She delighted them by doing nothing else for more than four hours, refusing offers of water or rest and hardly pausing to answer their questions. “I am a child of these mountains. I cannot get tired.”
She left her bodyguards wilting by the side of the road.
“Shouldn’t you be planting trees?” I asked one of them, who, it turned out, had been Moi’s bodyguard ten years ago.
“No, we are protecting the professor.”
“You’re nowhere near her,” I pointed out.
“She moves too quickly,” the bodyguard complained.
It was late afternoon by the time all the trees had been nestled into their red pockets of earth by the 100 or so volunteers from nearby villages. The heat seemed to swing up from the earth as well as pound down unfiltered from the equatorial sky. I thought our efforts could never compete with the African sun. It was dark and I was sunburned and tired as we bumped back into the town of Nyeri, so I did not notice the clouds coming up over the swell of hills from the low-bellied valley. Then the first, startling drops of rain splattered on our windshield followed by made-to-order gentle soaking for freshly planted saplings.
It was obvious. Even the skies obey Wangari Maathai.