Nobel Laureate Maathai dies

September 27, 2011: World famous environmentalist and Nobel Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai of Kenya passed away after a long battle with cancer. A Catholic and a former member of Legion of Mary, Maathai breathed her last in Nairobi on September 25. She was 71. Maathai spent her entire life working to protect Kenya’s forests from politically-elite land grabbers.
She also spoke out for the rights of women at a time when most Kenyan women had little public presence beyond the homestead. She was a major figure in the pro-democracy struggles of the 1980s and 1990s. During her work, she was routinely harassed, beaten, tear-gassed and jailed. But Maathai also achieved a litany of firsts: the first woman in east and central Africa to earn a Ph.D; the first woman to chair a department at the University of Nairobi; the first woman in east and central Africa to be appointed as a professor; the first African woman and environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
It is this spirit of perseverance that her colleague Edward Wageni most remembers. Wageni is deputy executive director of the Green Belt Movement, an environmental, civic, and women’s rights advocacy group Maathai founded in 1977. “What we have lost is somebody who has the courage of conviction, a person who focuses on an issue, who doesn’t really look at the people who are going to be applauding her,” said Wageni.
Wangari Muta Maathai was born in central Kenya in 1940. At a time when it was rare for Kenyan girls to go to school, she graduated from Loreto Girls’ High School in 1959 and went on to complete a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences from Mount St. Scholastica (now Benedictine College) in Atchison, Kansas. She then earned a master’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D at the University of Nairobi.
In the 1970s, Maathai became active in several environmental and humanitarian groups in Nairobi, consulting widely with women in rural areas. It was then that her passion for tree-planting took root. Ever since the creation of the Green Belt Movement, more than 47 million trees have been planted in Kenya.
Following the pro-democracy struggles, Maathai was elected a member of parliament for Tetu in the 2002 elections and was appointed deputy minister for the environment. Two years later she got the Nobel Peace Prize. Since then, Maathai has headed up several international efforts, including a United Nations’ campaign to plant one billion trees as part of a global effort to fight climate change.
But for all the accolades, awards, and honorary degrees she has received, colleagues and friends say Wangari Maathai had her two feet firmly planted in the ground. “She was very, very much connected to the grassroots - a person who would be able to interact with the lowest person at the grassroots, but at the same time be able to speak at the highest levels,” said Wageni. Maathai leaves behind three children and a grandchild.