Who was Wangari Maathai?

A Kenyan environmentalist and political activist who founded the Green Belt Movement and became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize.

Background. Born in rural Kenya in 1940, Maathai won a scholarship to study in the United States, then returned home and in 1971 became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate. She went on to chair a department at the University of Nairobi, again the first woman to do so.

The Green Belt Movement, founded in 1977, began from a simple observation: rural women were walking further for firewood and water, streams were drying up, and soil was eroding — all consequences of deforestation. Her response was to pay women small sums to plant indigenous trees.

The movement grew enormously, and is credited with the planting of tens of millions of trees across Kenya. Its significance went well beyond the trees:

It gave rural women income and organisation, in communities where they had little of either.

It linked environmental degradation to poverty and governance, arguing they could not be treated separately — an argument now mainstream and then unusual.

It became political. Tree planting brought the movement into direct conflict with a government allocating public land to political allies.

The confrontation. Maathai led opposition to a proposed skyscraper in Nairobi's Uhuru Park and to development in the Karura Forest. She was repeatedly arrested, beaten and imprisoned, and was assaulted by hired men while planting trees in Karura — an incident that drew international attention and contributed to both projects being abandoned.

Later recognition. She was elected to Kenya's parliament in 2002 and served as an assistant minister for environment. The Nobel Peace Prize followed in 2004, awarded for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace — a framing that itself established the link between environment and conflict.

She died in 2011.