Gone, but never broken.
Sep. 26th, 2011 10:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
teaoliWangari Maathai died today in Nairobi. She was an environmentalist, a biology professor, a politician and the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Twenty years before she received the Nobel, The Right Livelihood Award (often called the “alternative Nobel Prize”) named her their 1984 laureate.
Throughout her life, and through all its tribulations, she remained unbroken.
Her first memoir, Unbowed, is a book I read over and over and over again.
She founded The Greenbelt Movement, an initiative to plant trees in Kenya to begin restoring the ecology to the rich, vibrant, fertile state it was in before British colonization. Her experiences as a wife and mother (and the way she was expected to behave in those two roles, in spite of being the first African woman to earn a doctorate degree and one of the first female university professors in Africa) led her to fight for women’s rights, initially using tree-planting as an empowering tool for women who were oppressed.
My heart stuttered when I read. I have admired this woman for so long. Only this morning, less than two hours before I learned of her death, I picked up Unbowed and read just enough of her words to make me greet the day with hope. It actually hurt to read the news. At first I asked myself how it could be possible to grieve so much for a person I never knew. But this woman has been such an inspiration for me — in life, as well as in my writing — I know it couldn’t be any other way.
Wangari Muta Maathai: 1 April 1940 - 26 September 2011
Throughout her life, and through all its tribulations, she remained unbroken.
Her first memoir, Unbowed, is a book I read over and over and over again.
She founded The Greenbelt Movement, an initiative to plant trees in Kenya to begin restoring the ecology to the rich, vibrant, fertile state it was in before British colonization. Her experiences as a wife and mother (and the way she was expected to behave in those two roles, in spite of being the first African woman to earn a doctorate degree and one of the first female university professors in Africa) led her to fight for women’s rights, initially using tree-planting as an empowering tool for women who were oppressed.
My heart stuttered when I read. I have admired this woman for so long. Only this morning, less than two hours before I learned of her death, I picked up Unbowed and read just enough of her words to make me greet the day with hope. It actually hurt to read the news. At first I asked myself how it could be possible to grieve so much for a person I never knew. But this woman has been such an inspiration for me — in life, as well as in my writing — I know it couldn’t be any other way.
Wangari Muta Maathai: 1 April 1940 - 26 September 2011
