Radical Utu. Besi Brillian Muhonja

in some parts of the country in 1994.

      As prodemocracy leaders intensified the call for a functioning democracy, the vigilance of the government against any criticism heightened. Supporters of the opposition were forced to apply for licenses to hold meetings, which were habitually denied. Defiant, the movement’s leaders sometimes held the meetings anyway, resulting in numerous arrests. Political trials for treason and sedition became the order of the day. Maathai and the MGG continued their work through 1993 and 1994, often holding meetings at her house late into the night. Maathai reminisced in her memoir, Unbowed, “We held seminars in my house in the evenings, since during the day the house resembled a beehive, packed with Green Belt staff. People came over and sat in the living room and I’d teach, sometimes until one or two o’clock in the morning. . . . At this time, we were still being constantly monitored by government informers” (2007a, 250).

      On October 1, 1993, the pressure from the movements for democracy and women’s rights compelled the government to appoint a task force led by Justice Effie Awuor to review laws and customs relating to women. During its tenure, the task force would contribute to the drafting of bills that included the Equality Bill, the Affirmative Action Bill, the Family Protection Bill, and the Gender Policy Bill. As the first half of the decade wound down, Maathai and other Kenyan and African female leaders focused on preparations for the UN’s Fourth World Conference on Women, to be held in Beijing in 1995. It is important to note here that over four decades she worked closely with other champions of the postindependence women’s movement in Kenya. These sister-activists who influenced and were influenced by Maathai include Micere Mugo, Muthoni Likimani, Eddah Gachukia, Grace Onyango, Jane Kiano, Ida Odinga, Wanjiru Kabiru, Margaret Kenyatta, Achola Pala, Maria Nzomo, and Tabitha Seii. The organizations affiliated with the women’s movement in Kenya focused in the 1990s on building broader, stronger regional and global networks to fight for basic human rights and political inclusion for women. From November 16 to 23, 1994, the Fifth Regional Conference on Women was held in Dakar, where the African Platform for Action was adopted in readiness for Beijing. In the summer of 1995, Maathai convened, with the NCWK, a conference in Nairobi, also in preparation for Beijing (Maathai 2007a, 252; Chegu and Wamahiu 1999, 417). At the Beijing conference on August 30, 1995, she presented the paper “Bottlenecks to Development in Africa.” The spirit of the paper demonstrates why activities of the women’s movement following the Beijing conference were inextricably linked to the activities of the prodemocracy movement in Kenya. The paper also highlights the interconnections between global human rights and the challenges that Africans and their nations faced. This is illustrative of her holistic and utu-based approach to engaging knowledge and activism.

      The prodemocracy movement picked up steam during the second multiparty elections in 1997. On November 20, 1997, five weeks before the elections, Maathai announced that she would be running for president under the banner of the Liberal Party of Kenya in an election that included fifteen presidential candidates. The party was later renamed the Mazingira Green Party of Kenya, with a focus on promoting green values. The organization eventually became a member of the Green Parties of Africa and the global network of green parties. She reported that on the eve of the election, a rumor had circulated, with the help of the media, that she had withdrawn her candidacy for the presidency and the parliamentary seat. It was unclear whether this had any effect on her numbers in the election. The blow of a second win by Moi in multiparty elections was massive for the prodemocracy movement and the women’s movement. At the same time, it motivated and galvanized support for both movements as the twentieth century came to a close.

      Even as Maathai doubled down as a key player in both movements, the turn of the century was consumed with taking care of her mother, who passed away on International Women’s Day in 2000 (Maathai 2007a, 274). Maathai also immersed herself in activism against global economic systems that disadvantaged African countries. This work, including her service to the Jubilee 2000 Africa Campaign, is engaged in chapter 5. While her journey from 2001 to 2010 was still loaded with battles for democracy, justice, human rights, and environmental conservation, this was in many ways a winning decade for Maathai. She took up fellowships—Montgomery Fellow at Dartmouth College in 2001 and Dorothy McCluskey Visiting Fellow for Conservation at Yale University in 2002. Significantly, on the home front through the decade, the role of Wangari Maathai and others of the prodemocracy movement led to the realization of a new constitution in 2010 (Kramon and Posner 2011, 89; Kanyinga and Long 2012, 41). Additionally, Moi’s twenty-four-year rule ended in the presidential election of December 27, 2002, when Mwai Kibaki, the head of an opposition coalition, the National Rainbow Alliance (NARC), won. Maathai earned a seat in parliament to represent the Tetu Constituency in Nyeri District after receiving 98 percent of the vote as a NARC candidate. On December 30, Kibaki took power, and in January 2003, he appointed Maathai assistant minister in the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources.

      Many critiqued her lack of impact on government policies and structures in relation to the environment during her tenure, a situation some argue was contributed to by the fact that she was an assistant minister and not the minister. Over the decade, uplifted by the African Union’s passing of the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa, the new female parliamentarians, including Maathai, delivered an active women-focused agenda in Kenya’s parliament.

      In 2004, Professor Wangari Maathai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts toward realizing “sustainable development, democracy and peace” (Norwegian Nobel Committee, 2004). This was the most significant but only one of a plethora of prestigious awards she received, a list of which is included in appendix 1.

      In that same year, Maathai did an interview with Time magazine, in which she was widely reported as having claimed that HIV/AIDS was an agent created by the West to decimate African populations. She subsequently denied this in an interview with Pal Amitabh in the Progressive Interview, stating, “I never said what was being reported, and I don’t believe in it. . . . I don’t know why the reporter reported that, and I noticed that even though I kept saying that I didn’t say that, the reporter still continued to report what he wanted to report. . . . I am sorry that people got me completely wrong” (Maathai 2005c). Elsewhere (Maathai 2004b), she sought to clarify, saying, “I have . . . been shocked by the ongoing debate generated by what I am purported to have said. It is therefore critical for me to state that I neither say nor believe that the virus was developed by white people or white powers in order to destroy the African people. Such views are wicked and destructive.” Her statements failed to put this controversy to bed successfully, and it continues to plague her legacy.

      After receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, while she remained active in her roles within Kenya, Maathai also took on prominence and responsibilities that were more regional and global in nature, as chronicled in appendix 1. In 2006, she collaborated with sister laureates Jody Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, Betty Williams, and Mairead Maguire to start the Nobel Women Initiative, with the aim of promoting peace and equity. The laureates consolidated their experiences and vast influential platforms to bring attention to challenges of grassroots women across the world as well as to support their work and promote various initiatives and movements.

      In 2007, Maathai lost her bid to return to parliament and continued to work as an ambassador for human rights, women’s rights, democracy, and environmental protection globally. During the postelection violence in 2007–8, she joined mediation teams to promote unity and peace through restorative justice approaches, as she had done after the 2002 elections. She maintained her work with the GBM, which established new initiatives, including the Women and Girls project. To crown it all, in 2010, she helped establish the Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies (WMI),¹ housed at the same veterinary campus at the University of Nairobi where she had lost her job (S. G. Kiama,² personal communication with author, July 11, 2018). The establishment of this institution, which grants master’s and doctoral degrees, represented a full-circle return of Maathai the scholar, with her academic and activist ideals and ideas infused into the development of an entire academic institution. She served as WMI’s founding distinguished chair, a position she held until she passed away on September 25, 2011, at the age of seventy-one, following