On Wangari Maathai

Exactly 3 years ago, the veteran Kenyan environmentalist campaigner Wangari Maathai was on one of her periodic visits to Britain. On Monday, 5 February 2007, I heard her on the BBC Radio 4`s `Start the Week` programme talking about her work and career and her book `Unbowed: One Woman`s Story`. Then, after having earlier missed an opportunity to see her in person, I managed to attend her lecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects on Tuesday, and posted an account of it on the Africana-Orientalia forum the next day. This is what I wrote:

"She spoke for some 45 minutes without notes, but with a quiet certitiude. She is not pretentious. She uses simple language to convey complex ideas but without reducing them to meaningless rhetoric. She exudes charm and dignity. That is her charisma.

She first gave an account of her birth and upbringing, in a rural setting in the shadow of Mount Kenya - and how in 1960 she ended up in a college in Kansas under the massive aid programme that the US had launched during the Kennedy era for the education of Africans across the continent in preparation for independence, the Kenyan end of which was managed by people like Tom Mboya, Dr Kiano and Oginga Odinga (she named them). But while she was ensconced in a safe and secure confines of a college run by the Presbyterian Church, she was not unaware of the civil rights struggle that was raging in the background at the time.

Then she talked about her early struggles in Kenya, as an activist - how she came to launch the `Green Belt Movement`. She was seeing destruction of the natural bio-diversity of the forests in the Highlands, and how it was being replaced by what she termed `mono-cultures` - of farmlands and other forms of development which were resulting in a degradation of the environment. She said the dams across the Tana River were now no longer fit for purpose, as the waters were too silted, as a result of deforestation etc.

She explained why the Nobel Prize Committee that had sought to link her Peace Prize awarded in 2004 to issues of human rights, corruption and good governance. She said that when she started out way back in 1977, getting simple peasant women to plant trees, politics was far from their minds, but it was only when the momentum developed that they came into conflict with vested interests, but that had the effect of energizing them and to rise to the challenge of confronting authority. That is when she also became politically involved.

She then went on to give an interesting and detailed discourse on the nature and fundamentals of the environmental cause, particularly with reference to her African experience and local concerns, and her work and contacts on the international front. In this context, she recounted how she came to convince her Japanese ministerial counterpart, also a woman, of the need for recyling non-degradable material to better use through the example of the Buddhist principle of `Motaina`. She drove home her basic point - that while tree-planting may be seen as too simplistic a measure, trees represented a complex eco-system, giving shelter, food, support to lesser forms of vegetation as well as timber and other products - very convincingly.

There was lots more to her talk than this simple summary. She also mentioned the famous campaign by her to oppose the building of a 62 storey hotel by Moi in the middle of Uhuru Park in Nairobi in 1989 (as she said, `we were ridiculed, beaten, imprisoned` etc) but generously acknowleged the part played by the Kenya Society of Architects whose single-page advert in the national newspapers setting out a reasoned case against the proposal played a leading part in the national debate that followed and in winning over the argument - except that in her Kikuyu-accented English `architects` sounded like `actors` and most of us in the large audience (some 1000 strong) thought she was extolling Kenyan Actors!

So if she should happen to make an appearance anywhere near you whenever, I would urge you not to miss the event. Her speech reminded me of the times when, way back in the early `60s, students used to pack Westminister Central Hall to listen to Nehru whenever he came to London to attend Commonwealt(h) Prime Ministers Conferences".

The reference to Pandit Nehru was perhaps somewhat prophetic - because later that year, 2007, the BBC celebrated the 50th anniversary of Indian independence and partition with a comprehensive coverage of programmes, both contemporary and historical with a large selection from its archives, about the sub-continent - and so it provides the perfect cue for the next item.

RAMNIK SHAH
Surrey, England