History of Kenya
Mrs.
Nardi's 9th Grade World History Class
Lenox Memorial High School, Lenox, Massachusetts
The Green Belt Movement
Wangari Maathai was born into the Kikuyu ethnic group in April 1, 1940 in the village of Ihithe, between Mt. Kenya and the Aberdare Mountain Range. As she notes in her memoirs, "...[it] was then British Kenya...[and]...I was born as the old world was passing away (Maathai 3-7). '
Maathai lived through the State of Emergency in Kenya with only a momentary two-day stay in a detention camp near Nyeri. However, it was a memorable two days for as she recounted in her book,
I was detained only once when I was sixteen or seventeen. It was during the school holidays and I was on my way from high school in Limuru to Nakuru to visit my extended family...When I reached Nakuru town, I was arrested. I do not know the cause but suspect that even though I had the required passbook, it indicated I was from Nyeri and therefore should not have been anywhere near Nakuru..." (Maathai 67).
She remembered the conditions in the detention camps as "horrible---designed to break people's spirits and self-confidence and instill sufficient fear that they would abandon the struggle..."(68). That incident would be only the first time Maathai would spend time behind bars in Kenya. Later, she would be imprisoned for confronting abusive and corrupt authority several times in the 1970s, 80s and 90s as the Green Belt Movement challenged the building of a skyscraper in Uhuru Park, and again, during the mother's sit-in for the release of their sons imprisoned by the Moi regime.
Maathai was educated in a Loreto Girl's High School, amission school in Kenya and, then, in the 1960 with the "Kennedy Airlift" where she was flown to Atchison, Kansas to complete her continue her education at Mount St. Scholastica College. She moved to the University of Pittsburg to attain her master's degree in biological science. She completed her formal education with a doctorate in 1971 from the University College of Nairobi.
In 1977, she
established the Green Belt Movement in order to address the erosion she
saw as a major problem for Kenya and its people. As she remembers, "It
just came to me: Why not plant trees?" (125).