Kenyan Nobel winner Maathai, founder of "Green Belt" movement, dies

[BridgeTheGap]

(Reuters) - Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for her campaigns to save Kenyan forests, died in hospital on Sunday after a long struggle with cancer.

Maathai, 71, founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977 to campaign for tree planting to prevent environmental and social conditions deteriorating and hurting poor people, especially women, living in rural Kenya.

Her movement expanded in the 1980s and 1990s to embrace wider campaigns for social, economic and political change, setting her on a collision course with the government of the then-president, Daniel arap Moi.

Maathai, who won the Peace Prize in 2004, had to endure being whipped, tear-gassed and threatened with death for her devotion to Africa's forests and her desire to end the corruption that often spells their destruction.

http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/09/26/uk-kenya-laureate-idUKTRE78P0FX20110926

[Sal Minella]

1. "I cannot do everything but I can do something" as a life map.

"Former Kenyan president Daniel arap Moi called her ‘a mad woman’, and declared her a serious threat to the stability of the country. Her husband said she was ‘too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control’.

"‘Of course peace and the environment are connected,’ she shrugs. ‘Look at the wars we fight: they are almost always over resources: land, oil, water, grazing ground, fishing rights.’

"For years the Green Belt Movement was hardly noticed by the government, because, as Maathai points out, ‘only women’ were involved. So by the time the government machinery moved against Maathai she already had widespread grass-roots support. People understood that she was on the side of the poor and refused to believe the defamation pedalled via government stooges.

"Nonetheless, her activism landed her in jail numerous times, hastened the end of her marriage, sent her into exile in Tanzania for six months, and, in 1999, resulted in her being knocked unconscious while planting trees in Nairobi’s Karura Public Forest. ‘I never imagined the police would hurt us,’ she says of the Karura Public Forest incident. ‘I thought they were there to protect us because the crowd was so large, but then they charged.’"

http://www.theecologist.org/how_to_make_a_difference/cleaner_air_water_land/360176/wangari_maathai_fighting_for_kenyas_environment.html