Wangari Maathai: End of an era

Prof Wangari Muta Maathai — Africa’s first black woman Nobel laureate and among the world’s foremost environmental conservationist — who was cremated on Saturday October 8, left behind a powerful legacy.

The evening news of the death of Prof Maathai a fortnight ago was a shocker, especially because her illness was unknown to the general public, just like the announcement that she chose cremation over being buried in a wooden coffin.

“Prof Maathai’s departure is untimely and a great loss to all who knew her — as a mother, relative, co-worker, colleague, role model, and heroine; or who admired her determination to make the world a more peaceful, healthier, and better place,” reads a statement from the Green Belt Movement, announcing her death.

A politician, a professor of veterinary medicine and a conservationist, all rolled into one, Prof Maathai is best known for founding the grassroots based Green Belt Movement that empowers ordinary Kenyans to conserve the environment as a way of political and cultural emancipation.

Her ingenious illustration of the interconnections between culture, politics, economics and the environment marked a breakthrough in conservation activism, winning her several accolades.

In her acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, Maathai moved thousands to tears as she pointed out the destruction that humanity had visited on Mother Earth warning that we were doomed to extinction unless this was reversed.

The disappearance of the village well, in Tetu District of Kenya where she was born, painted the picture of destruction perfectly.

In her childhood, she recalled with nostalgia, there were hundreds of tadpoles swimming freely in the then lively village well.

A few decades later in 2004, the tadpoles that once enjoyed the freshness of the marshy water had disappeared, just like the water and the green growths that decorated it.

She blamed human activities around the well for its disappearance, and explained how that had disrupted her people’s way of life.
As a Nobel Laureate, Prof Maathai continued her passionate conservation crusades, especially in the context of global warming and reforestation.

usy diary

After 2008, when she dropped out of Kenya’s parliamentary politics after losing her seat after only one term, the 71-year-old professor went global. With the number of international assignments she was handling, Maathai was hardly in Kenya.

One day she was attending to the issues of the Congo Basin, as the roving ambassador of the Congo Basin, a role bestowed on her by Congo Brazzaville’s President Denis Sassou Ngeuso in 2005; another day she was making presentations at UN meetings, especially on her role as the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament, or just speaking to the media, on diverse issues.

She had a full diary.

“It is the people who must save the environment.