OBITUARY: Wangari Maathai: Nobel laureate and Kenya's Mother of Trees

By dpa correspondents Sep 26, 2011, 13:15 GMT

Nairobi - After decades of campaigning for the conservation of the environment, women's rights and democracy in her native Kenya, Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize.

She died at the age of 71 on Sunday.

Maathai was founder of the Green Belt Movement, a tree-planting scheme that expanded into a community programme and went on to extend well beyond the forests of the East African country.

Kenyans dubbed her Mama Miti, or Mother of Trees.

The movement's greatest impact, was 'the sense of hope and power it gives to ordinary women,' Maathai said.

'They can hardly read or write, yet they join the movement. The women respond so quickly to a common cause as they see it as a way to help the community at large.'

Initially the US-educated biology professor's work earned her high praise from then president Daniel arap Moi. But her criticism of the government's plan to construct a 60-storey building in a park in Nairobi put the two into direct conflict.

Maathai was harassed, detained regularly and even jailed briefly in the early 1990s. Her efforts at encouraging impoverished rural women to action did not go down well in deeply patriarchal Kenya, notorious for government corruption and criticized for human rights abuses.

At the time, Moi said in a veiled reference to her that opponents to the construction project had insects in their heads, and declared it un-African and unimaginable for a woman to challenge men.

In 1999, Maathai was badly beaten up by police while planting trees in Nairobi's Karura Forest in protest at ongoing deforestation. International human rights groups rallied to her side.

Maathai ran for public office several times but did not succeed until the groundbreaking 2002 elections when Moi stepped down and his long-ruling party was sent into opposition.

She was appointed assistant environment minister in 2003. 'At least I don't have to spend days in police cells. It is quite amusing sometimes when I meet the same policemen who were running after me with clubs and bullets. Now they are very respectful and they are saluting wherever I go,' she said.

Wangari Muta Maathai was born in April 1940 in the town of Nyeri in the foothills of Mount Kenya.

From a modest upbringing, she went on to become the first woman in East Africa to achieve a PhD in biology, and then the first woman to head a university department in Kenya.

Her civic activism earned her Sweden's Right Livelihood Award in 1984. She was hailed for her work in 'converting the Kenyan ecological debate into mass action for reforestation' by the foundation that bestows the award which is also often called the 'Alternative Nobel Prize.'

Two decades later, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, 'for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.'

Until shortly before her death from cancer, Maathai travelled the world as public speaker.

She leaves a legacy in Kenya that includes more than 30 million trees and hundreds of community networks that nurture thousands of tree nurseries across Kenya. Its members are mostly women, paid to plant trees in their immediate environment.

In central Nairobi, Uhuru Park remains the green lung Maathai had gone to battle for and won.

She is survived by her three children, Waweru, Wanjira, and Muta, and a granddaughter, Ruth Wangari.