The award of the Nobel Peace prize to Professor Wangari Maathai, for the year 2004, is a major recognition of one of the most outstanding daughters of Africa. It is the first time an African woman would be receiving the prestigious award. Even the Nobel Award committee underscored that in Professor Wangari Maathai that, a most worthy person has been recognised with the award.
Professor Wangari Maathai was born at Nyeri, Kenya on the 1st of April, 1940. She has worked as a university professor, but from 1964, has worked for the upliftment of women in Kenya and Africa. She has inspired and led a large, multi-faceted movement built to confront environment degradation in Kenya. Her work has pitted her against powerful political forces who have often used violence to confront any challenge to their control in society.
Above all, Maathai has been much better known for her work as leader of the Green Belt Movement, that has planted more than thirty million trees in Africa. The Nobel committee stated that Maathai won the prize, “for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.” The award to Maathai in fact represented a new environmental theme in interpreting the 1895 will of Alfred Nobel, with the committee adding that “we have emphasised the environment, democracy building and human rights and especially women’s rights.”
Professor Wangari Maathai has always spoken for human rights, is known to stand for a democratic, multi-ethnic Kenya, and in the work of the Green Belt Movement, has helped African people in general to understand the essential inter-face between environmental degradation and a multitude of issues, such as soil erosion, drought, hunger and poverty. The movement she leads organises projects which empower women, provides them incomes and helps to raise their status, while advancing their skills as leaders and organisers.
The very complex and comprehensive work that Professor Wangari Maathai has done over the past four decades has often been seen as a threat to the male chauvinistic circles in power in Kenya until recently. She was often ridiculed, or threatened as leading a movement that threatens the power of men. It is a testimony to her character that she had soldiered on, in situations that might have broken a less determined woman
Professor Wangari Maathai is an outstanding representative of the resilience of African womanhood on the one hand, and an example of what development processes generated at the grassroots and community levels can achieve, on the other hand, for the upliftment of the African peoples. It is also remarkable that Maathai understood that her work cannot be an apolitical substitute for the struggle for power in society.
She realises that state power in Africa must be responsibly administered to achieve sustainable husbandry of the African environment, through a development process that is integrated and based on the genuine needs of the mass of the African people, not to satisfy the rapacious appetite of foreign corporate bodies.
In her typically down to earth manner, she was reported to be “going about her business” in a remote area of Kenya, when the prize was announced. Maathai was reported to have wept with delight and planted a tree in the compound of her home at Nyeri, located in the shadow of Mount Kenya, Africa’s second highest peak, on recieving news of her award. She then remarked that “it cannot get any better than this – maybe in heaven.”
We salute the work that Professor Wangari Maathai has done over the past four decades in defence of the African environment, in the upholding of the dignity of the African woman, as well as in her dogged fight for democracy, human rights and social justice.
Maathai is a worthy laureate of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2004, and the recognition belongs to all the peoples of the African continent.
