Wangarĩ Maathai

Wangarĩ Maathai (/wænˈɡɑːri mɑːˈðaɪ/; 1 April 1940 – 25 September 2011) was a Kenyan social, environmental, and political activist who founded the Green Belt Movement, an environmental non-governmental organization focused on planting trees, environmental conservation, and women's rights. In 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

As a beneficiary of the Kennedy Airlift, she studied in the United States, earning a bachelor's degree from Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas and a master's degree from the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh. She then became the first woman in East and Central Africa to become a Doctor of Philosophy, receiving her Ph.D. from the University of Nairobi in Nairobi, Kenya. In 1984, she received the Right Livelihood Award for "converting the Kenyan ecological debate into mass action for reforestation."

Wangari Maathai was an elected member of the parliament of Kenya and, between January 2003 and November 2005, served as the assistant minister for environment and natural resources in the government of President Mwai Kibaki. She was a Honorary Councillor in the World Future Council. As an academic and the author of several books, Maathai was not only an activist but also an intellectual who made significant contributions to thinking about ecology, development and gender in addition to African cultures and religions. She died of complications from ovarian cancer on 25 September 2011.

Maathai was born on 1 April 1940 in the village of Ihithe, Nyeri District, in the central highlands of the colony of Kenya. Her family was Kikuyu, the most populous ethnic group in Kenya, and had lived in the area for several generations. Around 1943, Maathai's family moved to a white-owned farm in the Rift Valley near Nakuru, where her father had found work. Late in 1947, she went back to Ihithe with her mother, as two of her brothers were attending primary school in the village, and there was no schooling available on the farm where her father worked. Her father was still at the farm. Shortly afterward, at the age of eight, she joined her brothers at Ihithe Primary School.

When she was eleven, Maathai moved to St. Cecilia's Intermediate Primary School, a boarding school at the Mathari Catholic Mission in Nyeri. She studied at St. Cecilia's for four years. During that time, she became fluent in English and converted to Catholicism. She was involved with the Legion of Mary, whose members attempt "to serve God by serving fellow human beings." Studying at St. Cecilia's, she was sheltered from the ongoing Mau Mau uprising, which forced her mother to move from their homestead to an emergency village in Ihithe. When Maathai finished her studies there in 1956, she was rated first in her class and was granted admission to the only Catholic high school for girls in Kenya, Loreto High School in Limuru.

As the end of East African colonialism approached, Kenyan politicians, such as Tom Mboya, were proposing ways to make education in Western nations available to promising students. John F. Kennedy, then a United States senator, agreed to fund such a program through the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation, initiating what became known as the Kennedy Airlift or Airlift Africa. Maathai became one of some 300 Kenyans selected to study in the United States in September 1960.

She received a scholarship to study at Mount St. Scholastica College (now Benedictine College), in Atchison, Kansas, where she majored in biology, with minors in chemistry and German. After receiving a Bachelor of Science degree in 1964, she studied at the University of Pittsburgh for a master's degree in biology. Her graduate studies there were funded by the Africa-America Institute, and while she was in Pittsburgh, she first experienced environmental restoration, when local environmentalists pushed to rid the city of air pollution. In January 1966, Maathai received her MSc degree in biological sciences, and was appointed to a position as research assistant to a professor of zoology at the University College of Nairobi in Nairobi.

Maathai dropped her forename, preferring to be known by her birth name, Wangarĩ Muta when she returned to Kenya. When she arrived at the university to start a job, she was informed that it had been given to someone else. She believed this was because of gender and tribal bias. After a two-month job search, Professor Reinhold Hofmann, from the University of Giessen in Giessen offered her a job as a research assistant in the microanatomy section of the newly established Department of Veterinary Anatomy in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University College of Nairobi.