39 pages • 1 hour read
Wangari MaathaiUnbowed
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Pragmatic Resistance
Maathai’s activism is fueled by her background in science and biology, along with her worldly and complicated upbringing. Her scientifically trained mind enables her to find direct and simple solutions for complicated problems. At the same time, her cosmopolitan background gives her a flexibility and willingness to challenge ideas. For instance, she rejects the theory that cow parasites are the main cause of malnutrition in poor rural areas of Kenya. She quickly realizes that the problem goes deeper than that, noting that the cultivation of foreign trees is decimating the landscape. She therefore decides to help rural, poor women to organize and plant local trees, enabling them both to restore their landscape and to earn a livelihood.
As her Green Belt Movement expands, Maathai refines her training methods to make the movement both more humane and efficient. For example, she hires translators to empower the rural women whom she organizes to speak in their own local languages and better communicate their needs and observations. She brings a similar adaptability and solution-oriented focus to her activism.
Kenyan President Moi and his authoritarian government consider Maathai dangerous, but her brand of resistance is deliberate, peaceful and quiet. It focuses on finding creative and non-violent ways to challenge a divisive and bullying regime. Maathai holds local teach-ins to counter the tribalism that she believes the Kenyan government is encouraging in order to hold on to power; she also organizes activities such as football to restore a sense of common ground among people of different tribes. She insists on sowing connection and refuses to take the bait and rise to battle. When policemen surround her house on a cold night, implicitly threatening her with arrest should she leave, she offers them tea to keep warm (they later arrest her all the same). She explains that she and other marchers often employ the strategy of singing and dancing in front of policemen, both to give themselves strength and to relax the policemen: “When we were confronted with a tense situation, we would sing about the need to protect the forest, and dance. This was a way to disarm the armed men in front of us—and it worked” (272).
Peaceful resistance requires a sense of humor and playfulness, along with a certain steely detachment. As Maathai tells us, it requires patience and a pragmatic focus on solutions, just as much as her work as a biologist does: “I don’t tend to invite challenges, but I meet them. And once I do, I stick with it” (194).
The Complicated Legacy of Colonialism
Maathai grew up in a Kenya under British rule, and later returned as an adult to a newly independent Kenya. She is therefore well-positioned to see the ways in which Kenya has struggled with its colonial legacy. As she explains, Kenya is a nation that contains many different small nations, which have been forced, under the system of colonialism, to live together: “It is the case that the various ethnic communities in Kenya are, for all intents and purposes, distinct nations, what I call micronations […] However, in the late nineteenth century a large power with its own baggage brought us together and called us a nation” (249).
Maathai attempts, with her activism, to break down barriers among different Kenyan communities, even while the Kenyan government is enforcing these barriers and encouraging tribalism. Her Green Belt Movement is also an attempt to remedy the decimating effects on the Kenyan landscape of foreign trees and cash crops planted by British settlers. In encouraging the rural, poor women in her movement to speak their own local languages, Maathai also challenges a more insidious legacy of colonialism: the insistence on English as the dominant, acceptable language. As she states, such an insistence instilled a sense of inferiority in the Kenyan subjects of British rule: “Years later, when we became part of the Kenyan elite, we preferred to speak English to one another […] it instilled in us a sense that our local languages were inferior and insignificant” (60).
Maathai has received a largely English-speaking, European-style education, having gone to Catholic schools in both Africa and the United States. It is her subsequent membership in the “Kenyan elite,” and her ability to communicate in English, that will help her to make important international contacts as an activist and politician (60). This is one way in which the same forces that have suppressed her country also come to her country’s aide. Maathai notes that the European Christian missionaries who came to Africa in the 19th century did some good work, even while imposing their own religion and culture on a foreign people: “The missionaries would generally do their work by visiting villages and attending to people’s health needs […] I admire the missionaries’ patience and ingenuity in facilitating communication among people who did not understand one another’s languages. They did their work well” (8).
Maathai herself forms important friendships with the nuns at her Catholic schools, although these same nuns discourage her from speaking any language other than English and insist on the superiority of a European education to an African one. The effects of colonialist rule on Kenya, as she portrays them, are therefore not simple; a bond exists between Kenyans and white Europeans, for better and worse.
Battling Sexism
Maathai faces persistent sexism in her personal and professional life, as well as in her activist work. As a professor at the University of Nairobi, she must agitate to receive the same benefits that her male colleagues receive; while she and a co-worker eventually win this battle, they win it only for themselves. As a wife to a conservative businessman who later runs for political office, she struggles to play all of the different roles that her life requires of her while not causing offense to her husband or his social circle. Her very accomplishments are seen as detrimental in traditional Kenyan society: “Boys are provided education before girls and boys are expected to be greater achievers than girls. Therefore, it was an unspoken problem that I and not my husband had a Ph.D. and taught in the university” (139).
When Maathai’s husband leaves her, she must endure an ugly divorce battle, in which she is publicly demonized:
“The reporters and editors, like many others, assumed that if a marriage fails it is the woman who is not doing her job properly and obeying her husband […] And since I was an educated woman, being publicly humiliated would also serve to warn other such educated women that if they also dared to challenge such authority, the same fate would befall them” (146).
The more of a public figure that Maathai becomes, the more overt and threatening the misogyny she faces becomes. At one point, the Kenyan Parliament holds a “national emergency” meeting about her, designating Maathai as a security threat. The language used to describe her becomes increasingly personal and intimidating: “To the cheers of a packed house, one MP said that because I had supposedly repudiated my husband in public, I could not be taken seriously and that my behavior had damaged his respect for all women […] Members laughed while one parliamentarian even advocated calling down a curse, or salala, on me” (191).
Following a failed bid for a Parliamentary seat of her own in 1992, Maathai tells a reporter that “a woman politician needs the skin of an elephant” (254). This comment in itself shows her resilience, her sense of humor, and perspective in the face of sexist attacks and societal double standards.
