Wangari: My real story

Many people have had their say and written widely about Prof Wangari Maathai, the Member of Parliament for Tetu and winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. And, finally, the environmentalist has come down to penning the story of her life.

The Nobel laureate has endured great challenges from those in positions of power who have numerously branded her a mad woman. Indeed, at the height of her struggles against the misdeeds of the Kanu government, many were the Kenyans who, privately and even publicly, cast aspersions on her character.

Through Unbowed: One Woman's Story, Prof Maathai pens her story as she knows it – after all she is the one who has lived it.

She also seeks to set the record straight, at least from her perspective, on some of the perceptions about her.

This is a timely and welcome move, seeing that the Nobel Prize conferred on her life a stature along the lines of celebrated personalities like retired South African President Nelson Mandela.

This is evidenced by the fact that the memoirs have been published by Random House, a giant in international publishing circles.

The autobiography comes hot on the heels of a similar venture by another Nobel laureate (Literature), Wole Soyinka, whose memoirs, You Must Set Forth at Dawn, was released three months ago.

Public domain

Though much of Prof Maathai's life story is pretty much in the public domain, there are certain aspects in one's life that are best told by the person. The freshness of the owner's voice and his/her perspective of certain events makes all the difference.

For the first time, the environmentalist lays bare events that led to her divorce in the 1970s. In her bid to save Uhuru Park, she exposes the reader to a simple encounter with a university student that led to one of the most bruising battles she ever engaged the Kanu government in.

The book is largely a celebration of her activism, both for the sake of the environment, just governance and respect for human rights.

For anyone who tried to oppose the Kanu government at the height of its repression, there was definitely a price to pay. This ranged from brutal attacks by security agents, or hired thugs to constant imprisonment. Some people lost their lives in the struggle.

Prof Maathai was no stranger to this. Countless were the times she found herself in stinking police cells. She made regular visits to numerous hospitals for medication after being brutalised.

This was not enough to stop her steely resolve. If anything, the nasty encounters reinforced her determination to fight even harder.

Ironically, by clamping down on her activism, the Kanu regime greatly contributed to her being awarded the prestigious Nobel Prize. 

Regarding her marriage, Prof Maathai avers that her level of education might have been a major contributor to the breakdown.

She writes: "Nobody warned me – and it had never occurred to me – that in order for us to survive as a couple, I should fake failure and deny any of my God-given talents."

Matrimonial home

She tells of her pain when her husband Mwangi Mathai (note the single "a" after "M") walked out of their matrimonial home. She came home one day only to be told by the househelp that her husband had packed his belongings and left. 

"I was stunned," she recalls. "This was real: Mwangi had made a decision to leave me."

What was to follow was one of the messiest divorce cases in the history of the country and the media faithfully covered each sordid detail. "Mwangi accused me of adultery, of causing his high blood pressure and of being cruel."

As if that was not enough, she earned herself a six-month jail term, without the option of a fine, for criticising the magistrate who presided over the case. She was, however, set free after serving for only three days.

To date, her victory against the Kanu government on the issue of the proposed 60-storey Times Complex at Uhuru Park remains etched in the minds of many Kenyans.

It all began when a law student at the University of Nairobi came to her office one afternoon and told her of the government's plan. The student had heard about it from his relatives who were in the construction industry.

Bitter fight

He however swore her to secrecy regarding his identity, a promise Prof Maathai has faithfully kept.

It was in the course of the bitter fight that she made the now famous remark, in response to some parliamentarians' remarks about her gender. 

She wrote: "The debate is on the proposed TimesComplex at Uhuru Park and MPs should not be distracted by the anatomy below the line (if they know what I mean). . . Instead, the debate required the use of the anatomy of whatever lies above the neck."

The issue of the Times Complex has been revisited by writer Ngugi wa Thiong'o in his latest book Murogi wa Kagogo, whose English translation, Wizard of the Crow is now on the market.

In his fictional account, Ngugi talks of the ruler of an imaginary African state called Bureria whose efforts to construct Mathechaitu (skyscrapers to the heavens) were defeated by the power of women; an obvious reference to Prof Maathai. 

Though her battles with the Kanu regime had started way back in the early 1980s when the government tried to block her election as the chairperson of the National Council of Women of Kenya, they gained momentum after the Times Complex saga.

She was a marked woman. It is then that the government realised that it actually housed the woman whose organisation was causing them so much trouble. She was thrown out the office which was situated around the Central police station.

Actually, her problems with authorities started way back in 1966 when she came back to the country after completing her Masters degree in the US.

She had been promised a job in the Zoology department at the then University College of Nairobi, only to be told that the position had been given to another person who was still in Canada!

This is when she came face to face with discrimination on the basis of her gender and tribe. "I realised then that the sky would not be the limit! Most likely, my gender and my ethnicity would be," she writes.

Another department

Though she finally got a job in another department, eventually paving her way to be the first woman to head a university department in Kenya, this was not good enough in the male-dominated society.

She also had the distinction of becoming the first woman in East and Central Africa to receive a doctoral degree. "A significant achievement that went largely unnoticed," she writes. "It didn't even make the media headlines, probably because I was not the president, or his daughter, and my husband wasn't famous."

Clearly her activities with the Greenbelt Movement and the NCWK, while still at the university, did not go down well with the administration, and it was itching to see her back.

The opportunity arose when she resigned to contest a parliamentary seat in 1982. The university shut the door on her when she wanted her job back.

"The wheel sometimes comes full circle," she reflects. "After I was awarded the Nobel Peace prize, the university, which was pleased to see my back in 1982 . . . awarded me an honorary doctorate in science in 2005, with full honours."

Unbowed dwells in detail on how Prof Maathai came to be involved in matters of environment, an area far removed from her line of study. At some point she would annoy her husband when she filled their compound with tree seedlings.

When she started the tree planting project with women around the country, foresters were at first hostile to the idea of untrained people taking care of trees. Her response was: "You do not need a diploma to plant a tree."

The book talks of the beauty of African cultures and how they proved useful in conserving the environment. 

Prof Maathai paints vivid and romantic pictures of her formative years while growing up in Nakuru and Nyeri, where she cherished her encounters with nature in its most pristine form. 

Having been born during the colonial period and growing up during the Mau Mau struggle, Prof Maathai's treatment of that period in the book is rather casual and detached.

In spite of the fact that this was a period of much suffering by Africans as a result of colonial activities, the book only mentions these in passing, almost as an afterthought.

In some instances, what comes across is that colonialism was a necessary evil and not an injustice on Africans. 

This a major contrast from Koigi wa Wamwere's book I Refuse to Die, which captures the suffering and anger of the African masses in great detail.

This can however be explained by the fact that as opposed to Koigi, Prof Maathai led a sheltered life, having been educated in the convent from the age of eight to the time she left for further studies in the US.

She writes of her years at the St Cecilia's Intermediate Primary School: "The British propaganda kept us naive about political and economic roots of the conflict and was designed to make us believe that the Mau Mau wanted to return us to a primitive, backward and even satanic past."

She alludes to her sheltered life after an encounter with Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, while she studied in the US.

"My boss . . . must have wondered how I could have grown up in colonial Africa and yet have had no idea about the struggles of African Americans, the African diaspora or any knowledge of history or religion beyond what my Catholic education had taught me."

The book however closes ranks with I Refuse to Die in regard to the infamous Freedom Corner attack, on mothers of political prisoners by police.

In the Freedom Corner incident, Prof Maathai joined the women in solidarity, while Koigi related the incident as his mother was there fighting for his release. 

Reading through her brushes with the government during the Times Complex saga, the reader feels that she should have mentioned the names of politicians who made some of the unfortunate remarks about her, in and out of Parliament.

The decision to have her memoirs published by Random House, a foreign publishing house, is likely to raise questions as to why the job was not undertaken locally.

It is also worth noting that Ngugi wa Thiongo's confidence in the EAEP did not extend to the US and UK editions of Wizard of the Crow. They were done by foreign publishers.