10/24/2025
Amazing courageous woman who is still a positive role model to so many. Her legacy lives on!
Wangari Maathai became the first African woman in history to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. She did it with a simple idea - plant trees. 🌳🌳🌳...
Her daughter, Wanjira, said her mother couldn't believe it when she found out she'd won a Nobel Prize:
"For a while there she probably thought maybe it's a mistake," said Wanjira. "I think the whole day she sort of spent saying 'I didn't know anyone was listening.'"
Wangari founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, empowering local women to protest against environmental damage and plant trees.
Not everybody welcomed the movement. It brought her into vicious confrontation with land developers, their backers, and politicians.
Wangari was beaten up, threatened and arrested many times for her activism.
Her daughter Wanjira said her mother was often asked if she was afraid.
"She said... I was afraid. But she said, what needed to be done was so compelling that I had to do it."
Wangari grew up in Nyeri, in the highlands of Kenya. She thought it was the most beautiful place in the world.
"She described in such vivid terms her encounter with tadpoles, rapids around rocks," said Wanjira. "She would spend hours and forget that she had been sent to fetch water."
Wangari excelled academically, and studied in the US. On her return to Kenya she began to ask women about their problems.
"They were talking about lack of fuel, having to work hours to fetch firewood, lack of water and lack of nutritious food," said Wanjira.
Wangari connected these problems to the degradation of the landscape - and suggested the women plant trees.
Wangari and other protestors were hurt many times. Her children began to worry.
"We tried to stop her. We tried to say, well, what, do you really have to? But she was not to be stopped. I mean, she was so resolute," said Wanjiri.
Wangari was part of the opposition coalition that swept her power in 2002 - but two years later she was diagnosed with cancer and died in 2011.
Her legacy lives on.
"For us as Kenyans, as women, as Africans, I think the fact that one woman from the highlands of Kenya could be such a potent force for change remains one of the most inspiring things," said Wanjiri.
The Green Belt Movement spread to other African countries and has so far contributed to the planting of over 30 million trees.
The BBC spoke to Wangari's daughter, Wanjira, in 2016. She's an environmental campaigner who carries on her mother's work.