Lesley Riddoch: One woman, one vision, one future

PROFESSOR Wangari Maathai died last week at the age of 71. You probably don’t recognise her name. You may not remember she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. You may not know she was beaten unconscious by Kenyan police during a rally on her 60th birthday. You could not have heard her speak at the G8 Summit at Gleneagles in 2005 – the event designed to tackle all of Africa’s ills. She wasn’t invited.

But Wangari Maathai set up a radical land reform movement whose impact will outlast the destructive legacy of the men wrecking Africa – and the British politicians who paid only lip service to a woman whose vision could have prompted an African Spring back in 1989.

Maathai was the eldest girl amongst six children born to subsistence farmers on the foothills of Mount Kenya. She won a scholarship to study in America and returned to become the first woman in east or central Africa to complete a PhD in 1971.

Campaigning for her husband who stood for parliament that year she spotted the vicious circle that links poverty, hunger, environmental collapse and the status of women. Poor women spent most of their day scavenging for firewood to cook and wandered further and further from home to find it. As more trees were felled, soil erosion was leading to desertification, fewer meals were cooked, and malnutrition followed.

Maathai decided to break this chain of impoverishment with the Green Belt Movement (GBM).

Her plan was simple. Women would be paid to plant trees across Kenya, thereby fighting erosion, creating supplies of firewood for fuel and jobs for women and challenging corrupt land transfers by the Kenyan government.

On 5 June 1977, Maathai planted seven trees in a Nairobi park and offered free seedlings to women across Kenya to do the same. For every tree that survived more than three months the planter was paid two pence. The more trees they planted, the more they made. 700 trees paid for a beehive, a pottery or an oven to make cakes.

The scheme helped combat the spread of HIV by offering poor women an alternative to prostitution and because the tree nurseries taught them how to grow local crops, women were protected from price swings for export goods like coffee and maize. Not only did the scheme reverse deforestation but many women became financially independent.

Thousands of nurseries were set up across the country and spread to a dozen other countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

But as Maathai’s status grew, so did opposition.

Her husband divorced her in the early 1980s, citing adultery. Wangari suggested the real reason was that she was “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control”.

When the divorce court found against her she accused the judge of being “either incompetent or corrupt” and was jailed for six months (but released after three days after a grudging apology.)

She ran for parliament but was banned from standing and as a result lost her job at Nairobi University.

But Wangari Maathai refused to bow down.

She became a thorn in the side of Kenya’s previous president, Daniel Arap Moi, who described the Green Belt Movement as “subversive”. Indeed it was.

In 1989 Maathai launched a campaign against Moi’s plans for a 62-storey skyscraper and office complex (complete with a statue of himself) in Uhuru Park – one of the few green spaces left in central Nairobi – describing it as a “park monster”. Moi retaliated by saying it was “un-African and unimaginable for a woman to challenge or oppose men”.

Ironically that very year a World Bank report estimated women were responsible for 70 per cent of the world’s staple food production but enjoyed next to no property rights.

A national movement run for women by women was vital then – and now.

Tens of thousands of Green Belt women occupied Uhuru Park, defying police violence and baton charges. Wangari herself was beaten unconscious.

But foreign investors took fright at the negative publicity and the project was shelved.

Wangari had won. It could have been the beginnings of an African Spring.

The Green Belt Movement went on to plant more than 30 million trees in Kenya helping 900,000 women set up small businesses.

In 2006, with UN backing, Maathai launched a “billion tree” campaign. Today more than 12 billion trees have been planted by the Green Belt Movement.

But since no unpopular African governments were overthrown, since few guns were used and since no foreign support was either requested or given, the democratic revolution being kindled by Wangari Maathai went largely unnoticed in the West.

Even though she described the problems of her continent with pinpoint precision.

“You cannot blame corruption in Africa on colonialism or the excessive luxurious lifestyles that African leaders assume. You cannot blame it for mismanagement of the economy or inadequate investment in education.

“The developed countries know very well what Africa needs. We all know their excuses are corruption, misgovernance and money being used for weapons.

“They are excuses, but to a certain extent legitimate. Nobody’s going to pour money into a corrupt government– money meant for development but then used for buying weapons.

“Nobody’s going to pour money into a country impoverishing itself by destroying its environmental base.

“Wars are fought over resources. If we did a better job of managing our resources sustainably, conflicts over them would be reduced. Protecting the global environment is the best way to secure peace. And you cannot protect the environment unless you empower people, inform them, and make them understand these resources are their own.”

This could have been the template for a sustainable grassroots revolution in Africa – instead multinationals and foreign governments are once again grabbing land in Africa, displacing local people and using land for biofuels and cash crops. Oxfam has just published evidence showing an area the size of north-west Europe has been sold, leased or licensed to international investors in secretive deals since 2001.

Maathai will be missed. But she is survived by three children, a granddaughter… and by her great vision.

“In the course of history, there comes a time when humanity is called to shift to a new level of consciousness. A time when we have to shed our fear and give hope to each other. That time is now.”