A decade after the death of Kenyan environmentalist and 2004 Nobel peace laureate Wangari Maathai, her daughter explains why her mother’s vision and example are as necessary as ever.
In September 2007, my mother was being driven to a conference on the Congo Basin Rainforest Ecosystem in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, when she noticed a woman on hillside. At once, she recognized the woman’s hard labor, but also that she was digging a furrow in line with the slope, and not against it. My mother knew that when it rained, the soil and seeds would all be swept down the hill. Why, she asked herself, was that woman farming in such a counter-productive way? Where, as my mother writes in her book The Challenge for Africa, were the government extension agencies to give that woman farmer the tools, both intellectual and practical, so she’d plant on less-degraded land or more efficiently?
Prof, as my mother was widely known by friends and colleagues, also wondered who among the educated and political elites that she was a member of would understand that woman’s reality, or even see her, as they shuttled between their national, regional, and international gatherings? Who else among her peers, Prof asked herself, would be that woman’s voice around conference tables when decisions were made that would affect her life, and those of her and millions of other women’s children and grandchildren?
It’s ten years since my mother’s untimely death from cancer at aged 71, and I find myself thinking still about how she encompassed so many diverse communities: university-educated and in tune with the ways of nature; rural and urban, grassroots advocate and member of parliament, localist and internationalist. I remember her joy, her passion, her prophetic voice, and her remarkable courage. She maintained and drew strength from them when the powerful belittled, imprisoned, or beat her in the 1980s and 90s in Kenya because she dared to say “No” to corruption, land-grabbing, and destruction of the forests and the ecosystems on which all life depends.
I think of the communitarianism she practiced and the love of the land she shared with her mother, a farmer, and the rural women who planted tens millions of trees across Kenya through the Green Belt Movement, which Prof founded in 1977. And I look at my two daughters and worry about the choices they’ll face if we don’t heed my mother’s warnings and example. Will my daughters and their generation inherit an utterly degraded world, where the privileged few hoard the few natural resources left and remain oblivious to climate justice? Or will their grandmother’s values of justice, love of the earth, and service have prevailed?
Prof felt deeply the obligation all of us have to leave behind a world in which future generations wouldn’t merely survive, but thrive. She’d welcome in the younger generation of climate and environmental activists a fierce commitment to human dignity and the non-human world. She’d support them in demanding better of their peers, their elders, and their leaders. She’d be amplifying their call to halt deforestation, accelerate a just transition in the energy sector, and stop land-grabbing and exploitation of biodiversity.
Prof would also echo their challenge to countries and multinationals of the global North to acknowledge their outsized role in creating the climate emergency, and she’d be demanding that African solutions, African delegates, and African civil society be represented in the halls of power. And she’d be marching with these activists to encourage governments to see ordinary Africans like the farmer in Yaoundé and protect their natural resources rather than squandering or selling them to foreign concerns.
In Copenhagen in 2009 at the UN climate conference, my mother and other delegates sat overnight in the plenary hall and were hugely disappointed in the morning by the failure of the world’s richest and most powerful countries to agree on climate action proportionate to the scale of the crisis. In November in Glasgow, the world’s nations will convene again, at the COP26 climate summit, that may determine the future of the human project on this planet. The stakes are that high. And those least responsible for its cause are facing each day a climate emergency.
In Glasgow, will Africa and the rest of the global South finally get the commitments promised but that have still yet to materialize from the big and historic emitting countries: no-strings-attached North–South technology transfer; finance to fund adaptation; equitable and extensive investment in renewable energy; and a halt to the rampant exploitation of minerals, forests, oceans, and wildlife?
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Will African governments seize the initiative and meet the climate emergency by investing in public transit, walking and biking infrastructure, sustainable food systems, forest protection and restoration, education, and entrepreneurship? We’re all watching, with trepidation and hope.
Although she’s no longer present, I believe my mother’s spirit guides the millions of people, and especially the younger generations, who’ll be raising their voices before, during, and after COP 26, and then taking action for just and lasting change—including for those too often forgotten like that woman farmer in Yaoundé .
"I have been on a journey and this journey has never stopped," my mother wrote about her life, and assured us that she’d “keep walking, as long as my knees hold out". She did—and so must we.
Wanjira Mathai is the Vice President and Regional Director for Africa at the World Resources Institute and chair of the Wangari Maathai Foundation. She lives in Nairobi, Kenya.
