The meaning of Wangari Maathai’s life – by a rogue African journalist

The death of Nobel Peace Prize winner and eminent environmentalist Wangari Maathai brought to an end the easiest part of her life.

The most difficult, making sense of what her life meant, must now begin.

It was impossible to think of Maathai without thinking of forests and trees.

It was as if there is no forest she didn’t want to save, and no open space in which she didn’t want to plant a tree.

So, ultimately, it is from the forest and trees that we must seek the meaning of her great life.

One of the forests she fought to save is Karura, which lies between Limuru and Kiambu roads.

Now, cab drivers who have worked that route ferrying foreign visitors to places like Village Market, have an interesting old story.

In the late 1990s, before the American and, later, Canadian, embassy was built in Gigiri, those ends of town seemed remote.

The story goes that a government official was visiting Nairobi from the wildly forested Democratic Republic of Congo.

His country had just gone through a rebel war that ousted its long-time dictator Mobutu Sese Seko.

He was, understandably, therefore, uneasily aware of the power of forests (where rebels hid).

He had heard of Village Market and asked a cab to take him there. As the cab hit Karura Forest, he panicked and started shouting hysterically as he fumbled to jump out of the cab.

Forests do that to Africans. So to be an environmentalist in Africa at the time when Maathai set out on her green journey, was something special.

No object stars in African (and indeed European) folklore, fairytales and mysteries like the forest (and river, you might add).

From Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, to the tales of Amos Tutuola, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, to Chinua Achebe, the forest is inescapable.

It is a magical place full of generous fairies and handsome princes; but also a place of menace, crawling with ogres and evil snakes.

African tradition, however, goes beyond this two-dimensional view of the forest and introduces a third spectrum — a spiritual one.

For the African, the gods live in the forest. In Nigerian author Achebe’s books, when a citizen of the village offends custom, he is taken to the forest and finished off.

However, when the community is in distress, when its harvests have failed, offerings are taken to the forest to ask the gods to intervene.

In more recent times, when Maathai was a little girl of say, 10, the forest brought liberation to African women.

In times of arranged marriages, girls (who never went to school) in the village could only independently meet young men who were not picked for them by their parents when they went to the well or to the forest to collect firewood.

At the same time, the forest was a source of bondage and discrimination because the girls were condemned to collect firewood, while the boys went to school.

One of the most complex contradictions of our times developed.

In one sense, it seemed necessary for the forest to go away for women in African villages to find freedom.

But when the forest went away, things got worse. Women walked longer distances for firewood.

Over the years, we solved the problem of water. We dug boreholes and safe wells. But the forests just kept disappearing.

So the fight to protect the forest, had essentially to be a fight for women’s rights.

The latter required that you challenge the political order, that most women of Maathai’s generation were too isolated and feared the resulting rejection, to do. However, Maathai did.

In that sense, she was not just the original environmentalist, but also one of the region’s pioneer feminists.

But women’s rights make little sense in an undemocratic context. So Maathai became a democracy activist.

Still, all those weren’t enough. Maathai needed to be something else — to embrace the spirituality of the forest, the logic that it is the source of our sustenance.

By choosing to champion a campaign that planted trees, she expanded that sustenance.

With that she entered a fourth dimension; she became a cultural activist (in the epistemological sense of the word).

I have tried, and simply can’t find any woman of recent times who existed simultaneously in the four dimensions that Maathai did.