Wangari Maathai is honored by The E-Accountability Foundation
LINK

HON. PROF. WANGARI MAATHAI
2004 NOBEL PEACE LAUREATE, Giraffe Heroine, Founder of The Green Belt Movement:
Wangari Muta Maathai was born in Nyeri, Kenya, East Africa in 1940. The first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree, Prof. Maathai obtained a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Biology from Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, USA (1964), a Master of Science (M.S.) in Biological Sciences from the University of Pittsburgh, USA (1966), and pursued doctoral studies in Germany and the University of Nairobi before obtaining her Ph.D. in Anatomy in 1971 from the University of Nairobi. In 1976, she became Chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy, and, a year later, Associate Professor in the Department of Veterinary Anatomy, both at the University of Nairobi-the first woman in the region to attain those positions.

Prof. Maathai was active in the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK) from 1976 to 1987 and was its chairperson from 1981 to 1987. It was in 1976, while serving in the NCWK, that she introduced the idea of planting trees using ordinary people. She continued to develop the idea into a broad-based, grassroots organization called the Green Belt Movement (GBM), launched in 1977. GBM's main activity involved women's groups planting trees to conserve the environment and empower themselves by improving their quality of life. Through GBM, Wangari Maathai has helped women plant more than 30 million trees on their farms and in school and church compounds across Kenya.

In 1986, GBM established a Pan-African Green Belt Network. Over the years GBM has exposed a number of people from African countries to its community empowerment and conservation approach. As a result of GBM sharing its experiences and its belief in grassroots participatory methods to solve local challenges, a number of individuals have established GBM-like tree-planting initiatives in their own countries, or have used some of GBM's methods to improve their programs. To date, initiatives have been successfully launched in Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Lesotho, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, among others.

In September 1998, Prof. Maathai launched a campaign formed out of the Jubilee 2000 Coalition. She played a leading global role as co-chair of the Jubilee 2000 Africa Campaign, which advocates for canceling the backlogged, non-repayable debts of poor African countries. Recently, her campaign against "land grabbing" (illegal appropriation of public lands by unscrupulous developers) and the rapacious "re-allocation" of forest land has received much attention in Kenya and the region.

In December 2002, Prof. Maathai was elected to Kenya's parliament with an overwhelming 98 percent of the vote. She now represents the Tetu constituency, Nyeri district in central Kenya (her home region). Subsequently, in January 2003, President Mwai Kibaki appointed her Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources in Kenya's ninth parliament, a position she currently holds.

Wangari Maathai is internationally recognized for her persistent struggle for democracy, human rights and environmental conservation. She has addressed the United Nations on several occasions and spoke on behalf of women at special sessions of the General Assembly for the five-year review of the 1992 Earth Summit. She served on the Commission for Global Governance and the Commission on the Future.

Over the years, she and the Green Belt Movement have received numerous awards, most notably the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize.


The Passing of a Humming Bird – A Tribute To Prof. Wangari Muta Maathai
Posted on September 26, 2011 by Wamathai
LINK

The bird hummed where eagles feared,
Sang the taboo words,
Tuned to the emancipation of masses,
With an ecstatic difference.

She walked where angels feared,
Talked the language of the voiceless,
When the breeze blew against all odds
And put on a brave march.

As the dawn for our liberation – the Second Birth,
She stood for the truth, with fearless attitude,
And earned a viper’s wrath.

The bird lifted the land high above,
When she held the coveted prize,
For the quest in restoring our dignity,
And we all shouted in her praise.

She fought for you, me and us,
And made us proud,
Our future was restored,
At last, as it ignites our heritage.

Then the wind blew so hard,
That it was too difficult to steer,
Or perch on the nearest tree.

The wing could not move further,
And the sun finally rested on her,
Before, just before the dawn.

The daughter of the African cause,
The tigress that pounces,
The mother of restoring our dashed hope,
The fertility of the land,
The peace beacon of Kenya, Africa, the earth.
Rest in peace,
Prof. Wangari Muta Maathai

© mburu kamau

Visionary, human rights advocate, womanist, mother, Kenyan activist Wangari Maathai has passed away at 71. Maathai lost her battle with cancer after being in hospital for a week, reports the New York Times.

As we mourn the loss of such an important African heroine, we remember five quotes she left behind as seeds for change:

“My heart is in the land and women I came from.”

“African women in general need to know that it’s okay for them to be the way they are – to see the way they are as a strength, and to be liberated from fear and from silence.”

“We can work together for a better world with men and women of goodwill, those who radiate the intrinsic goodness of humankind.” “All of us have a God in us, and that God is the spirit that unites all life, everything that is on this planet. It must be this voice that is telling me to do something, and I am sure it’s the same voice that is speaking to everybody on this planet – at least everybody who seems to be concerned about the fate of the world, the fate of this planet.”

“Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own.”

Read this amazing tribute to Maathai by Kenyan poet Mburu Kamau.