Lone ranger who made fools out of men

 

 

By Peter Wanyonyi

 

For one born on April Fools’ Day, it would have been expected for her life to be one long, running joke.

Instead, she spent much of her adult life making fools out of men — men in power and authority, men with oodles of cash to woo her — or, when she refused, to boo her with, men of influence and little shame and even less sense.

Kenyans got to know of this pioneering woman in the mid-80s, before she achieved activist notoriety for loudly opposing Kanu’s coterie of corrupt and vacuous cheerleaders. But it was in a humbler, more important business that she made her bones: planting trees and getting people to realise that the well-being of the country, of the continent, indeed of the whole earth depended upon kowtowing to mother nature.

 

Controversy

 

No one listened. In an age when women were expected to lie low like envelopes, she was derided for being a divorcee. Kanu cheerleaders, some of whom today masquerade as reformers, said if a woman couldn’t stick in her matrimonial home, she was a loose canon not worth listening to.

Mad, she was called. It didn’t help that she had a PhD — the first East African woman to be so awarded, blazing a trail in science for women in the region, in an age when women were merely teachers, secretaries, telephone operators, nurses and loyal wives.

Controversy was never far off, either. She steadfastly opposed the shamba forest management system when she was assistant minister in charge of Environment, a position that was at odds with official Government policy.  She single-handedly battled the garbage menace that Kenyans have sanitised as polythene ‘paper’ and scoffed at coffins because they wasted trees.

When remarks she made about HIV having all the hallmarks of an artificial virus were reported in the West, condemnations flowed free and fast. But at that point, it didn’t really matter anymore: she was already a Nobel Laureate, the proverbial prophet who never receives recognition in her hometown.

 

Academic dwarfs

 

A short-lived career in politics had gone awry with fellow intellectual, President Kibaki, appointing her a mere assistant minister in a Cabinet filled with her intellectual inferiors and academic dwarfs. She took the slight with grace, ending up being a voice of reason when, in the wake of the fiercely contested Presidential election of 2007, Kenya descended into an orgy of unparalleled ethnic and political violence.

Her final days were quiet, spent away from the limelight, reports stressing that she passed away peacefully in the company of her loved ones.

Those who haunted her have been thrust into the dust bins of history, but she will remain a forthright, forceful and fearless crusader of the link between environment, politics and governance to poverty and human prosperity.

In her life, she was the pioneer, the renegade lone ranger, staring men in the eye and giving them a piece of her considerable mind without fear. And they feared her because she punched — hard.

Wangari Muta Maathai. 1940-2011.  Unbowed.