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.