Thinkers Timeline

Wangari Muta Maathai was a Kenyan environmental activist, scientist, and politician. In 2004 she became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She was born on 1 April 1940 in Nyeri, a rural area in central Kenya, into a Kikuyu farming family. As a child she gathered water from springs protected by tree roots. Her grandmother told her that a large fig tree near the family home was sacred and should never be cut down. These early experiences shaped her later love of trees. In 1960 she was selected for the Kennedy Airlift, a programme that brought East African students to study in the United States. She earned a biology degree at Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas in 1964 and a master's degree at the University of Pittsburgh in 1966. She returned to Kenya, completed a doctorate at the University of Nairobi in 1971, and became the first woman in East or Central Africa to earn a PhD. In 1977 she founded the Green Belt Movement, an organisation that paid rural women to plant trees. The movement grew quickly and eventually planted over 50 million trees. Through it, Maathai connected the protection of the environment to women's economic rights and to democratic politics. The Kenyan government under President Daniel arap Moi opposed her. She was harassed, beaten, and jailed several times. She kept going. After Moi lost power in 2002, she was elected to parliament with 98 percent of the vote and served as Assistant Minister for Environment. The Nobel Peace Prize came in 2004. She died of ovarian cancer on 25 September 2011, aged 71.