On This Day in History: December 27

Nobel Peace Prize Winner Wangarĩ Maathai

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“The generation that destroys the environment is not the generation that pays the price. That is the problem.” –Wangarĩ Maathai, the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: December 27, 2002--

Born Wangarĩ Muta in 1940 in the central highlands of Kenya, Wangari Maathai was also the first woman in East and Central Africa to achieve a doctorate, earning a PhD from the University of Nairobi in 1971. The following year she began teaching at the same school, being the first woman to attain several positions. She also became an activist, successfully campaigning for equal benefits for female university staff.

In 1979 she divorced from her husband Mwangi Mathai, who complained that she was “too strong-minded” and he was “unable to control her.” The judge ruled in her husband’s favor, for which Wangarĩ called the judge corrupt. He charged her with contempt, and she was sentenced to six months in prison, but only served three days because she had a kick-ass lawyer. Her now ex-husband demanded she stop using his last name and she said fuck you and added another “a” to it instead. Continues below …

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Late in the 1970s Maathai began a grassroots environmental movement to stop mass deforestation in Kenya that threatened both farmers and the environment. Called the Green Belt Movement, it spread to other African nations and led to the planting of over 30 million trees, mostly by women she had mobilized. It was not only an environmental movement, but also a political one that fought against the lack of democracy in her nation. Big surprise, the oppressive single-party regime that ruled Kenya was not amused.

Maathai spent the next two decades fighting for open and fair elections in her country, and on December 27, 2002, as a member of the National Rainbow Coalition, she was elected to parliament, securing 98% of the vote. In that same election the Rainbow Coalition unseated the Kenya African National Union, which had been ruling the country for 40 years. The following year Maathai formed the Mazingira Green Party of Kenya, which embodied the environmental mission of the Green Belt Movement. That same year she was appointed Assistant Minister of the Environment.

In 2004 she became not only the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but also the first environmentalist. The Nobel committee said of Maathai, “She thinks globally and acts locally.” The author of four books, Maathai wrote of her own achievements: “What people see as fearlessness is really persistence.”

Wangarĩ Maathai died of ovarian cancer in 2011 at the age of 71. Her remains are interred in Nairobi at the Wangarĩ Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies.

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