"Kenya's green militant" wins Nobel Peace Prize

By Fred Barbash and Emily Wax
The Washington Post

Wangari Maathai: "absolutely overwhelmed."

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most read articles Most e-mailed articles

Other links Nobelprize.org

Yesterday's announcement, by the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, makes her the first African woman to receive the $1.3 million prize, generally regarded as the world's highest tribute. Among past laureates are President Carter, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Lech Walesa, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King Jr.

Maathai, feminist, environmentalist and crusader against corruption in Kenya, now is her country's deputy environment minister.

Typically, speculation about who would win this year's prize was all wrong, with most of it centering around immediate events, such as chaos in the Middle East and weapons of mass destruction. The most-mentioned contender was Director General Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

"We have added a new dimension to the concept of peace," said Ole Danbolt Mjoes, head of the prize committee. "We have emphasized the environment, democracy building and human rights, and especially women's rights."

The award will be handed out Dec. 10 in Oslo, Norway.

Nobel Prizes Winners of 2004 Nobel Prizes and those to be announced: Monday: Seattleite Linda Buck and Richard Axel won the prize for physiology or medicine for their work in explaining the sense of smell. Tuesday: David Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek won the physics prize for revealing how forces in the atomic nucleus keep it from flying apart. Wednesday: Israelis Aaron Ciechanover and Avram Hershko and American Irwin Rose won the chemistry prize for revealing a process that gives doomed proteins a chemical label and then chops them up. Thursday: Austrian Elfriede Jelinek won the literature prize for what the Swedish Academy called her "musical flow of voices and counter-voices in novels and plays." Yesterday: Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai won the peace prize for her work as leader of the Green Belt Movement, which has sought to empower women, improve the environment and fight corruption in Africa for almost 30 years. Monday: Economics

"I am absolutely overwhelmed," said Maathai, 64.

While Maathai has not been widely known to the general public, she is a legend among global environmental activists and feminist leaders alike and a presence at international environmental conferences. She has been described variously as an "ecofeminist," "ecowomanist" and "Kenya's green militant."

The impetus for Maathai's movement was deforestation in Kenya, a process that has taken 90 percent of the country's forest over 50 years. One of the consequences Maathai saw was that women and girls had to spend hours every day searching for wood for cooking fuel.

In 1978, Maathai, then a U.S.-educated college professor at the University of Nairobi, suggested the planting of trees as a way to help rural women survive the decrease of firewood. The movement spread across Africa and was responsible for the planting of more than 30 million trees. She expanded it to embrace human rights, women's rights and the politics of democracy.

In 1989, Maathai led a one-woman charge against the autocratic government of former President Daniel arap Moi when he wanted to build a skyscraper and six-story statue of himself in gritty Nairobi's only public green space.

She lost her case in court. Because of her protest, though, no financiers were willing to work on the project. That area of the park now is called Freedom Corner.

Maathai has been intimidated from time to time and even beaten by police in the course of her protests. She was hospitalized in Kenya in 1999 after being clubbed by guards hired by developers while she and her followers tried to plant trees in Karura forest.

In 1992, she was among a group of women who stripped naked in downtown Nairobi to protest police torture. The police had beaten them to disperse their demonstration and, as she later said, the women "resorted to something they knew traditionally would act on the men. ... They stripped to show their nakedness to their sons. It is a curse to see your mother naked."

Mwalimu Mati, deputy director of Transparency International, a watchdog group in Nairobi, said Maathai "was threatened physically and was called a busybody in the press, yet she didn't flinch."

"She's converted a lot of us to understand why the environment is so important. She worked along for a very long time, and she deserves this recognition. Now she has the real moral authority to challenge people who are selfishly allocating themselves land."

In its citation yesterday, the Nobel committee said, "Peace on Earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment. Maathai stands at the front of the fight to promote ecologically viable social, economic and cultural development in Kenya and in Africa. She has taken a holistic approach to sustainable development that embraces democracy, human rights and women's rights in particular. She thinks globally and acts locally."

In Nairobi, David Makali, the director of the Media Institute, said: "This is fabulous news and real legitimately good news ... for Kenya and Africa. This will increase the visibility of the country and our campaign" for environmental reform.

"We are really in a crisis with our forest cover below 2 percent."

Maathai earned a degree in biological sciences from Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kan., in 1964. She received a master's degree two years later from the University of Pittsburgh and a Ph.D. from the University of Nairobi in 1971.

She was the first woman in east and central Africa to earn a doctorate degree and the first to become a ranking professor at a major university.

"I have had the fortune of breaking a lot of records," Maathai said in a 1992 interview. "First woman this. First woman that. And I think that created a lot of jealousy without me realizing. Sometimes we don't quite realize that not everybody's clapping when we're succeeding."

Among those not clapping was her husband, who launched a very public, nasty divorce action against her. When he won — on the grounds, as she put it, that she was "too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control" — she denounced the judges and landed in jail on contempt charges.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

E-mail this article

Print this article

Search archive

More nation & world headlines...