Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai was a Kenyan biologist, environmental campaigner and politician who founded the Green Belt Movement, which paid rural women to raise and plant trees across Kenya. Her campaigns against land grabs and one-party rule made her one of the best-known critics of the government of Daniel arap Moi, and in 2004 she was the first African woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

She was born on 1 April 1940 in Ihithe, a village in Nyeri District in the central highlands of what was then the colony of Kenya, part of the British Empire. Her family was Kikuyu. At a Catholic boarding school in Nyeri she learned fluent English and became a Catholic, and she was largely shielded there from the Mau Mau rebellion, which forced her mother into an emergency village. In 1956 she won a place at Loreto High School in Limuru, the only Catholic girls' secondary school in the colony.

As independence approached, Kenyan politicians such as Tom Mboya arranged for promising students to study in the West, with funding from a foundation backed by John F. Kennedy. In September 1960 Maathai was among some 300 Kenyans sent to the United States on this "Kennedy Airlift". She took a biology degree at Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, in 1964 and a master's at the University of Pittsburgh in 1966. After further research in Germany at Giessen and Munich, she earned a doctorate in veterinary anatomy from University College Nairobi in 1971, becoming the first woman in East Africa to gain a PhD. She later became the first woman in Nairobi to head a university department.

Through the National Council of Women of Kenya and an environmental liaison body linked to the UN Environment Programme, which had its headquarters in Nairobi, Maathai came to see deforestation and soil loss as the root of many rural problems. On World Environment Day, 5 June 1977, the council planted seven trees in a Nairobi park, the first event of what became the Green Belt Movement. Women gathered seeds of local trees, raised seedlings in nurseries and were paid a small sum for each one planted out. Foreign funding from Norway and the UN let the movement grow, and from 1986 it helped set up similar schemes in other African countries.

Her private life was turbulent. Her husband, the politician Mwangi Mathai, divorced her in 1979, and when she criticised the judge she spent several days in prison for contempt of court. In 1982 she was barred from standing for parliament and lost her university post.

In 1989 she led opposition to a planned 60-storey tower for the ruling party in Nairobi's Uhuru Park. The government and parliament ridiculed her and evicted the movement from its offices, but foreign investors withdrew and the project was cancelled in January 1990. As a campaigner for multi-party democracy she was arrested in 1992 and charged with sedition and treason, charges dropped later that year after international pressure. That March police beat her unconscious during a hunger strike by mothers of political prisoners. In 1999 she was again injured when a group of men attacked protesters planting trees in the Karura Forest, which officials planned to hand to political allies.

When the opposition coalition finally defeated the ruling party in December 2002, Maathai won her home constituency of Tetu with 98 per cent of the vote and served as assistant minister for the environment under Mwai Kibaki until 2005. The Nobel committee honoured her in 2004 for contributing to sustainable development, democracy and peace. That year a newspaper reported that she had called HIV a Western creation, which she denied. She lost her seat in 2007, continued campaigning internationally, and died in Nairobi of ovarian cancer on 25 September 2011.

Our 1945 map shows Kenya as a British colony during her childhood, and the 1960 map captures the eve of independence, the year she left to study in the United States.