By Cyrus Ombati
Prof Wangari Maathai, 71, was educated in the United States at Mount St Scholastica and the University of Pittsburgh, as well as the University of Nairobi in Kenya.
In the 1970s, Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, a non-governmental organisation focused on environmental conservation and women's rights.
In 1984, she was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, and in 2004, she became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for "her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace."
Maathai was elected Tetu Member of Parliament and served as Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources in the government of President Kibaki between January 2003 and November 2005.
She once led a group of mothers and other women to strip naked in a bid to force the Kanu government to release political prisoners at what is now known as Freedom Corner at Uhuru Park.
Koigi Wa Wamwere described Wangari death a terrible loss.
Maathai was born in the village of Ihithe, Nyeri District, on April 1, 1940. Around 1943, Maathai's family relocated to a white-owned farm in the Rift Valley, near Nakuru, where her father worked but late in 1947, she returned to Ihithe with her mother.
When she completed her secondary education in 1956 she was rated first in her class, and was granted admission to Loreto High School Limuru.
After graduating from Loreto-Limuru in 1959, she planned to attend the University of East Africa in Kampala, Uganda.
However, the end of the colonial period of East Africa was nearing, and Kenyan politicians, such as Tom Mboya, were proposing ways to make education in Western nations available to promising students.
John F. Kennedy, then a United States Senator, agreed to fund such a programme through the Joseph P. Kennedy Jr Foundation, initiating what became known as the Kennedy Airlift or Airlift Africa. Maathai became one of about 300 Kenyans chosen to study at American universities in September 1960
