Obituary: Wangari Maathai Environmental activist who received Edinburgh Medal

The mountain streams ran crystal clear when Wangari Maathai was born, the eldest daughter of the second of four wives of her polygamist farm labourer father, in a tiny village on the lower slopes of 17,040-feet Mount Kenya. Maathai, who was to become the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize and who has died from cancer at the age of 71, recalled collecting tadpoles as a small girl from those streams. “Many years later when I went back, the clean rivers had been filled with red silt and the tadpoles were no longer there,” she said. “My own child could not play with them as I had.”

The cause of the calamity was the deforestation of Mount Kenya. Huge tracts of pristine woodland had been corruptly clear-felled for agriculture. In the early 1970s, Maathai returned from advanced biology studies in the United States and joined the National Council of Women of Kenya. She found that rural women members, many from the Mount Kenya foothills, were complaining bitterly about the lack of clean water and the miles they had to walk to find firewood.

Maathai’s genius, recognised eventually beyond her native continent, lay in her realisation that these women’s problems were linked to the dramatic changes she had witnessed in her childhood landscape. She decided she had to do something practical about it.

“The women told me what they needed − firewood, food, water, building materials,” she said. “And I realised that these needs were not being met because deforestation was leading to soil loss, to springs drying up, and rain patterns changing that meant farmers were not able to produce enough food to last until the next season. I realised something had to be done.”

So in 1977 she planted seven seedlings in her back yard and a movement was born that has since sown some 45 million trees around Kenya.

“Initially, it was simply about women helping themselves: give yourself firewood, give yourself fruits, give yourself fodder and protect your soil,” said Maathai, who advised women to “hold onto the blessings of rain and not let one drop leave your own land.” Soon, her Green Belt Movement became also a women’s human rights, anti-poverty and anti-corruption organisation.

She said that when women planted trees, they also planted seeds of peace and hope. But she was hated by Kenya’s spectacularly crooked president, Daniel arap Moi. Her efforts to stop Moi and other powerful politicians grabbing land, especially forests, brought her into conflict with the authorities, and she was beaten, arrested and tear-gassed many times. In spite of Moi, her bravery and defiance made her a hero in Kenya, and in April 1993 she was awarded the Edinburgh Medal, given in Scotland’s capital to individuals judged to have made a significant contribution to the understanding and well-being of humanity. Many international awards that followed.

In 2004 she travelled to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee cited her “holistic approach to sustainable development that embraces democracy, human rights and women’s rights in particular and serves as inspiration for many in the fight for democratic rights. Her unique forms of action have contributed to drawing attention to political oppression – nationally and internationally.”

John Githongo, a leading Kenyan anti-corruption campaigner who was forced into exile because of his own outspoken views, said of Maathai: “She was known to speak truth to power. She blazed a trail in whatever she did, whether it was in the environment or politics.”

Maathai was born into a home without electricity or running water. Her mother, from the Kikuyu, Kenya’s most populous ethnic group, insisted her daughter obtain a good education. She attended Kenya’s only Catholic High School for girls, Loreto High in Limuru. In the early 1960s she was awarded a JF Kennedy bursary to study in the United States.

She returned home to newly-independent Kenya in 1966 with a master’s degree in biology from the University of Pittsburgh. She was appointed a research assistant at the University of Nairobi, obtained a PhD and became Professor of Veterinary Anatomy.

In May 1969 she married Mwangi Mathai. Ten years later, after a lengthy separation, he sued for divorce, saying she was too strong-minded for a woman and that he was unable to control her.

He publicly accused her of adultery and of causing his high blood pressure. The divorce court judge agreed with the husband. Maathai accused the judge of being either incompetent or corrupt.

The judge was so enraged by her comments that she was charged with contempt of court, found guilty, and sentenced to six months in jail. Shortly after the divorce, her former husband sent a letter via his lawyer demanding that his ex-wife drop his surname. In defiance, she chose to add an extra “a” instead.

On 8 November, 1989, parliamentarians loyal to Moi expressed outrage at Maathai’s actions, complaining of her letters to foreign pressure groups and calling the Green Belt Movement and her pro-democracy Forum for the Restoration of Democracy bogus organisations and its members “a bunch of divorcees”.

The MPs suggested that if Maathai was so comfortable writing to Europeans, perhaps she should go live in Europe. In January 1992, she and other pro-democracy activists learned that they had been targeted for possible assassination by Moi’s security forces.

After Moi stepped down in 2002, after 24 years in power, Maathai served briefly as a deputy environment minister before falling out with the new head of state, president Mwai Kibaki, whom she accused of being as corrupt as Moi.

To the end, during her brief terminal illness, she fought for women’s rights and environmental conservation. She told domestic and international audiences that the two issues were intimately linked. “Poverty leads directly to environmental degradation, because poor people do not think of the future and will cut down the last tree if necessary,” she said to an Earth Summit audience in Johannesburg.

“But environmental degradation will also lead to poverty, because when you have no soil you have no grasses, no trees and no water: you cannot really help yourself. I say to the women: If we say we are too poor to take care of the environment then it will only get worse. We have to turn it around and push the poverty back. Planting trees breaks the cycle: when we can give ourselves food, firewood, and help to nurture soil for planting and clean water, then we begin to roll poverty back.”

Wangari Maathai is survived by three daughters and a granddaughter.