Wangari Maathai Was Too Hard to Control for a Husband, and Won the Nobel Peace Prize for the Same Stubbornness

She was beaten unconscious in a Nairobi park, divorced for being too educated, and called subversive by a president. She planted more than thirty million trees and became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, turning a campaign about firewood into a theory of how peace is built.

The park

On March 3, 1992, a fifty-one-year-old biology professor named Wangari Maathai stood in a tent in Uhuru Park, in the center of Nairobi, leading a group of elderly women in singing. They had been fasting for four days. They were the mothers of political prisoners, men jailed by the government of President Daniel arap Moi for demanding multi-party democracy, and they had come to a corner of the park across from Parliament to starve until their sons were released. Maathai, who had founded the Green Belt Movement fifteen years earlier by paying rural women to plant trees, had led them there.

At three in the afternoon, the General Services Unit, a paramilitary police force, surrounded the tent. Officers fired tear gas into the crowd and charged with batons. A canister struck Maathai in the head and she fell unconscious. The police beat the women with clubs and rifle butts. Some of the mothers, aged between sixty and eighty, stripped off their clothes and stood naked before the police, shouting, "What kind of government is this that beats women! Kill us! Kill us now! We shall die with our children!" In Kikuyu tradition, a mother baring her body before a man who has wronged her is a curse. The police turned away.

Amnesty International documented the attack. Maathai was taken to hospital, along with two other women. The remaining mothers were arrested, detained overnight, and bused back to their rural homes. The corner of the park where they had camped was given a name that stuck: Freedom Corner.

Maathai later explained why the stripping worked. "In the African tradition," she said, "people must respect women who are close to their mother's age, and they must treat them as their mothers. If men beat mothers, it is like sons violating their mothers, and the mothers respond by cursing them. And they curse them by showing them their nakedness."

The mothers moved to All Saints Cathedral, one block away, and kept fasting in shifts for nearly a year. When one woman grew too weak, another took her place. By January 1993, fifty-one of the fifty-two prisoners had been released. A hunger strike by grandmothers had cracked open a dictatorship.

Why trees

Maathai was born on April 1, 1940, in the village of Ihithe, in the central highlands of what was then British Kenya. She was the third of six children and the first girl, born to Kikuyu peasant farmers who lived from the soil. She described the world she inherited in her memoir, Unbowed (2006): "We lived in a land abundant with shrubs, creepers, ferns, and trees. Because rain fell regularly and reliably, clean drinking water was everywhere. There were large well-watered fields of maize, beans, wheat, and vegetables. Hunger was virtually unknown."

As a child she caught tadpoles in a stream fed by a spring near her home. "As a child, I used to visit the point where water bubbled up from the belly of the earth to form a stream," she wrote. "I imagine that very few people have been lucky enough to see the source of a river."

In 1960, as colonial rule ended, she was selected as one of roughly three hundred Kenyans sent to study in the United States through the Kennedy Airlift, a scholarship program organized by the Kenyan politician Tom Mboya and funded by the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr. Foundation. She earned a bachelor's degree in biology from Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, in 1964, and a master's from the University of Pittsburgh in 1966. In Pittsburgh, she watched local environmentalists push to clean the city's air, her first encounter with citizens forcing change. "The spirit of freedom and possibility that America nurtured in me made me want to foster the same in Kenya," she wrote, "and it was in this spirit that I returned home."

She went back to Nairobi and found that the job she had been promised at the university had been given to someone else. She believed this was because of gender and tribal bias. She eventually found a post in the Department of Veterinary Anatomy, and in 1971 became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate, in veterinary anatomy from the University of Nairobi. By 1976 she was chair of the department. She was the first woman to hold any of those positions.

When she looked at the land of her childhood, it had changed. The forests she remembered had been cleared and replaced with commercial plantations of exotic trees. The fig tree near the stream where she had caught tadpoles had been cut down, and the stream had dried up. "By then I understood the connection between the tree and water," she wrote, "so it did not surprise me that when the fig tree was cut down, the stream where I had played with the tadpoles had dried up."

Working through the National Council of Women of Kenya, she met rural women who told her they could no longer find firewood, clean water, or enough food. The land was eroding. The women were walking miles for wood that had once been at their doorsteps. Maathai asked herself what could be done. "Now, it is one thing to understand the issues," she wrote. "It is quite another to do something about them. But I have always been interested in finding solutions. It just came to me: 'Why not plant trees?'"

On June 5, 1977, World Environment Day, she led a procession from downtown Nairobi to Kamukunji grounds, where they planted seven trees in honor of historical community leaders. That was the start of the Green Belt Movement. She paid rural women a small stipend for each seedling they raised and planted, and the money gave them income they controlled. She called them foresters without diplomas. "Anybody can dig a hole and plant a tree," she said. "But make sure it survives. You have to nurture it, you have to water it, you have to keep at it until it becomes rooted so it can take care of itself. There are so many enemies of trees."

The idea looked simple, even harmless. It was not. Planting a tree required a woman to organize, to keep records, to meet other women, to claim public space, and to ask why the trees were gone in the first place. The answer led to commercial plantations, land grabbing, and a government handing public forest to its allies. An environmental campaign became a civic education program, and a civic education program became a democracy movement.

Too hard to control

In 1977, the same year she planted the first seven trees, her husband Mwangi Mathai left her. They had married in 1969 and had three children. After a separation, he filed for divorce in 1979. His stated grounds, as widely reported, were that she was "too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control." The judge agreed and granted the divorce.

The words are worth pausing on. Every quality listed is a quality that would, over the next twenty-five years, build a movement, survive beatings and jail, and win a Nobel Prize. The court that dissolved her marriage was diagnosing the exact traits that made her dangerous to a dictatorship.

After the divorce, Mwangi sent a letter through his lawyer demanding that she drop his surname. She refused. Instead she added an extra "a" to "Mathai," making it "Maathai," and kept it. When she later told an interviewer from Viva magazine that the judge in the divorce case was either incompetent or corrupt, the judge charged her with contempt of court. She was found guilty, sentenced to six months in jail, and released after three days at Lang'ata Women's Prison in Nairobi when her lawyer produced a statement the court accepted.

President Moi's government would give her worse. He called her a "madwoman." The ruling party's press labeled her environmental movement "subversive," a code word for anti-government. A pro-government women's group denounced her as un-African for arguing with men and refusing to submit.

The tree becomes a weapon

In October 1989, Maathai learned of a plan to build a sixty-story skyscraper, the Kenya Times Media Trust Complex, in Uhuru Park. The complex would house the ruling party's headquarters, a shopping mall, parking for two thousand cars, and a large statue of President Moi. She wrote letters of protest to every relevant office, including the British High Commissioner, urging him to intervene with Robert Maxwell, the British businessman who was a major shareholder. She told the envoy that putting a tower in Uhuru Park was like putting one in Hyde Park or Central Park, and that it would not be tolerated.

She filed a lawsuit on November 27, 1989, seeking an injunction. The court dismissed it on December 11, ruling that she had no locus standi, no legal standing to sue, because she had suffered no personal injury and only the Attorney General could act on behalf of the public. The judge called her personal views "immaterial." The next day, Independence Day, President Moi stood at the site and said those who opposed the project had "insects in their heads."

She had lost in court. But the letters, the press coverage, and the government's hostile response attracted international attention. The foreign investors withdrew. In January 1990, the project died. She had won by losing, and the lesson was clear: the regime's own aggression, exposed to daylight, was the most persuasive argument against it.

The Freedom Corner hunger strike in 1992 applied the same principle at greater cost to her body. In January 1999, at Karura Forest on Nairobi's northern edge, where developers allied with the government were clearing public land for luxury homes, she led twenty demonstrators to plant trees at the forest gate. Two hundred private security guards armed with machetes, whips, pangas, and bows and arrows attacked them. Maathai was hit with a club and suffered a gash in her head that kept bleeding. She was hospitalized. "I never imagined the police would hurt us," she said afterward. "I thought they were there to protect us because the crowd was so large, but then they charged." The police had been seen talking to the guards before the attack and made no arrests. The Attorney General, Amos Wako, later apologized.

Each beating drew more attention. Each arrest made the cause more visible. The regime's violence was not a side effect of her work. It was the proof of her argument: that the destruction of the environment and the destruction of democracy were the same project, run by the same people, and that you could not fight one without fighting the other.

In her Nobel lecture, she said it plainly: "Although initially the Green Belt Movement's tree planting activities did not address issues of democracy and peace, it soon became clear that responsible governance of the environment was impossible without democratic space. Therefore, the tree became a symbol for the democratic struggle in Kenya."

The idea whose time had come

On October 8, 2004, the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Wangari Maathai the Nobel Peace Prize, "for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace." She was the first African woman to receive it, and the first laureate chosen primarily for environmental work. The committee's press release said she "thinks globally and acts locally."

The choice was controversial. Some questioned whether tree-planting was a peace activity. Maathai's answer, delivered in Oslo on December 10, 2004, reframed the question. She stood at the podium and began: "I stand before you and the world humbled by this recognition and uplifted by the honour of being the 2004 Nobel Peace Laureate. As the first African woman to receive this prize, I accept it on behalf of the people of Kenya and Africa, and indeed the world."

She traced the logic of her life, from the stream of her childhood to the thirty million trees her movement had planted. She argued that environmental degradation, poverty, and conflict were linked, that scarcity of resources drove war, and that restoring the environment was therefore an act of peacemaking. "There can be no peace without equitable development," she said, "and there can be no development without sustainable management of the environment in a democratic and peaceful space. This shift is an idea whose time has come."

She described what the tree had become: not just wood and shade but a symbol of democratic struggle, a tool of reconciliation between communities, and a marker of the right of citizens to govern themselves. "Through their involvement," she said of the women who planted, "women gain some degree of power over their lives, especially their social and economic position and relevance in the family."

By then, Moi had fallen. In the free elections of December 2002, Maathai was elected to Parliament with ninety-eight percent of the vote, representing Tetu constituency in Nyeri. In January 2003, President Mwai Kibaki appointed her Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources. The woman who had no legal standing to sue over a park was now helping govern the environment she had spent her life defending.

She kept planting. "It's the little things citizens do," she said. "That's what will make the difference. My little thing is planting trees." The Green Belt Movement spread to Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Lesotho, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe. By the time of her death, the movement and its offshoots had helped plant more than fifty million trees.

Wangari Maathai died of complications from ovarian cancer on September 25, 2011, in Nairobi. She was seventy-one. The Kenyan government gave her a state funeral, making her only the third Kenyan and the first woman to receive the honor. The funeral procession passed through Uhuru Park, past Freedom Corner, where she had been beaten unconscious nineteen years earlier. She had asked for a casket made of hyacinth, papyrus, and bamboo. She wanted, at the end, to leave the trees standing.

Read the full life: Unbowed: A Memoir by Wangari Maathai (Knopf, 2006).