If you plant a seed, who can see how tall the tree will grow? Every seed needs to be natured with love and patience. The young sapling must learn to stand alone and weather many storms and droughts.
The strongest tree refuses to grow in anyone’s shadow instead it rises and rises into the light like this female icon and noble Laureate-Africa’s Green Lady, Wangari Maathai.
Born in 1 April 1940 this Kenyan female political activist and environment conservationist went through rough and tough road. But she reached there.
‘I don’t think that anyone of us as we were growing up ever dreamed of what we could become. For most of us we just grow up and make the best or should make the best of our environment. Make the best of education make the best of the learning from our parents, our friends, our relatives because quite often that’s what eventually moulds you and creates the person that you eventually grow up to be’, Maathai Wangari’s dialogue during the documentary of Unsung Heroines.
Wangari Maathai is well educated. She studied in the United States of America and Kenya as well and got her first degree in 1964. When she returned from the US, Kenyan men as well as the government looked down upon her, just like any stereotype thinking can dictate. She did not care, she moved on. The negative attitude against her made her become more aggressive and a roadmap for her activism.
She grew up seeing women making baskets, beautiful ones. As years went by about forty years, women changed and no longer made baskets. Making baskets is skills, and if that skill is not passed to the young generation it is lost as well as productivity. People started embracing plastics as a sign of development although look nice but plastics are polluting the environment and they are also serving as habits for mosquitoes in a country. Just like any other African country, Kenya is trying to fight malaria so strongly.
Dr. Maathai is among the respected women in the continent who played many roles- as environmentalist, feminist, politician, professor, human rights activist and head of of Green Belt Movement she founded in 1977. She began the movement to reforest her country by paying women a few shilling to plant trees.
The Greenbelt Movement is a non -governmental organisation focused on planting trees across Kenya to fight erosion and to create firewood for fuel and jobs for women.
Good characters are always rewarded, Dr. Maathai is no exception. She received several awards including Right Livelihood Award 1986 and became first African lady to receive the Nobel Prize 2004 for her sustainable development, democracy and peace.
From 2003-2005 she served as Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources in Kenya under President Mwai Kibaki.
Towards the end of 2011 she battled with her life and died of complications from ovarian cancer.
Dr. Wangari Maathai is Unsung Heroine from Kenya-the female icon and noblest laureate.
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