Unbowed: A Memoir

Green Peace

Wangari Maathai of Kenya has endured derision, death threats, imprisonment and beatings -- not so unusual for a Nobel Peace Prize winner. What is most astonishing about Maathai, the first environmentalist and first African woman to win the prize, is her lifelong refusal to be defined by anyone or anything other than herself.

Maathai, 66, received the prize in 2004 for making a connection between environmental destruction, particularly deforestation, and human conflict. Known by many as the "Tree Lady" and usually called Professor Maathai, she has lobbied not only to reverse environmental degradation but to put her chronically underemployed countrywomen and countrymen to work planting trees -- a project that evolved into the Green Belt Movement (GBM). The nonprofit's goal is to plant greenbelts of trees across Kenya and, eventually, across several other African countries; so far, more than 30 million have taken root.

But the scope of Maathai's activism has gone far beyond planting trees. As she writes in Unbowed, she and the GBM also began to plant ideas in Kenyans, particularly the poor rural women she first set out to help. Maathai, the first East and Central African woman to earn a doctorate, educated women both by example and by teaching about human -- particularly women's -- rights, democratic space, and about how much could be achieved through grassroots efforts. In no small part due to her efforts, Kenya, for many years a one-party nation ruled by one man, has evolved into a multiparty democracy.

This clear-eyed memoir describes three acts in the ongoing drama of the great woman's life: innocence and education, heartache and determination, and, ultimately, triumph -- though, like most triumphs, hers is not free of personal, everyday sorrows. Maathai writes movingly of her Edenic childhood in rural Africa, the pleasure she took in education, particularly the sciences, and the lessons she gathered from her college sojourn in the United States during the civil and women's rights movements. Maathai adored her mother, the second of her father's four wives, who, though illiterate herself, supported the suggestion by Maathai's older brother that Wangari attend school along with her brothers.

Her love of learning, her curiosity, her pragmatism and her natural leadership abilities have led her to look beyond Kenya's -- and the world's -- seemingly intractable problems. But Maathai's success as an activist and university professor inspired fear and contempt in her nation's deeply conservative, male-dominated culture -- so much so that her husband, with whom she had three children, divorced her, saying, in a possibly apocryphal quote, that she was "too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control." Maathai (who, in a gesture of defiance and self-definition, added another "a" to her married surname of Mathai after the divorce) doesn't remember his saying that, writing that it was "the press's expression of what they perceived his sentiments to be."

Whatever he may have said, Maathai was, and blessedly remains, all those things. In her memoir, but more importantly in her life, she makes the case that persistence is courage. She renounces self-pity and embraces hope, and in the process has lifted many from despair to dignity.

Jan Cottingham is a freelance journalist living in Little Rock, Ark.

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