and critical thinking. Through the seasons of her life, I recount the advent of her activist and scholarly identities, selves, and roles. I draw her narrative primarily from her memoir, interviews, and media reports and meld it with Kenyan and global histories of the different seasons of her scholarship and activism.
Wangari Muta was born on April 1, 1940, in the village of Ihithe, Nyeri, in the central highlands of what was then British Kenya, to peasant farmers Muta Njugi and Wanjiru Muta, who were members of the Gikuyu ethnic group (Maathai 2007a, 3–4). She was the third of six children and the first daughter of her biological mother. Her earliest memories on record are mostly connected to experiences with her mother, with whom she was very close. Growing up in a polygamous family, she remembered the four mothers living mostly in harmony and being supportive of each other, although she acknowledged the existence of some dissonance in the family and that her father beat his wives (19). Nevertheless, she reflected on her childhood with unmistakable nostalgia. Her earliest memories place her family residing and working on a farm in Nakuru belonging to a settler named Mr. Neyland (14–28). In 1947, Wangari, her mother, and her sisters left the farm to join her brothers on the family’s ancestral land in Ihithe. This move increased young Wangari’s responsibilities as eldest daughter within the home and family (37). She said, “I was very much my mother’s helper . . . literally almost emulating her and being a little woman around the house” (2009a).
Historical, political, and social coincidences stimulated the early development of what would become Maathai’s distinctive personality—as a radical humanist and defender of women’s and human rights and the environment—and grounded what would become her value system, utu. Her childhood was punctuated by significant moments in Kenya’s political history. The early years of her life coincided with the founding of nationalist initiatives and movements by African Kenyans. At the time, Jomo Kenyatta had become leader of the Kenya African Union (KAU), formerly the Kenya African Study Union, amid rumblings of nationalism. Adding to the development of her person was her family’s appreciation for formal education. Members of her extended family were part of the athomi, translating to “readers” or “those who could read.” This was the moniker assigned to those who had acquired some level of formal education, a status distinction that abetted the construction of social classes during and after colonialism. Wangari started her formal education at Ihithe Primary School, following the intervention of her brother, Nderitu, and her mother’s agreement to send the young girl to school (Maathai 2007a, 39). Here began her journey as muthomi, a reader, a scholar. Thus, the muthomi was born in an environment that also supported the genesis of her political and environmental consciousness. At the same time, Wangari started her life as a farmer, a lover of the environment.
Wangari tended year-round a small plot of land given to her by her mother, even while she helped her mother and brothers cultivate the larger family land (Maathai 2007a, 46). This was at a time when people in many parts of the country had lost their land to white settlers, who commandeered the most productive land as property of the Crown or private property. Karuti Kanyinga (2009) demonstrates that the process of alienating Kenyans from their land took place in steps, first with the protectorate acquiring the land, then by the establishment of English property law, endorsing and giving authority to that acquisition. The ancestral and customary recognition of landownership was replaced by Crown laws that privatized ownership by individuals and the colonial state, facilitating the foundation of the settler economy (327). These settlers then used underpaid African labor, especially of men, leaving women, such as Wangari’s mother, and children to tend what was left of family land and some women as the only full-time, active parents. Maathai’s words and works recognize women as autonomous society members and leaders with agency, a trait she appreciated from her childhood.
The Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), popularly known as the Mau Mau, responded to this appropriation of native land and loss of freedom by revolting from 1952 until 1956. British officials countered with violence and martial law (Branch 2007; Kanogo 1987; Koster 2014, 2016; Githuku 2015). The beginning of the KLFA uprising and the consequent declaration of the state of emergency by British prime minister Winston Churchill coincided with Wangari’s entry into intermediate school after completing her Kenya Primary Examination with extremely high scores at Ihithe Primary School in 1951. She proceeded to boarding school at St. Cecilia’s Intermediate Primary School at Mathari, a Catholic mission in Nyeri (Maathai 2007a, 53). Her mother and brother felt that this option held the best promise for her even though the family could ill afford the fees to send her there. This choice would insulate her from the political happenings in the outside world for the time being.
In 1952, then-governor Evelyn Baring declared a state of emergency in Kenya on behalf of the British government and sent British and African soldiers to help colonial administrators capture Mau Mau fighters and send them to detention camps (Heather 2017; Kanogo 1987). It was as part of this campaign that, on April 8, 1953, Jomo Kenyatta, who would become independent Kenya’s first prime minister, and then president, was convicted for being a leader of the Mau Mau. He and five others, Bildad Kaggia, Achieng’ Oneko, Paul Ngei, Kung’u Karumba, and Fred Kubai, collectively referred to as the Kapenguria Six, were sentenced to seven years with hard labor (Ngesa 2013, 3). Nationalist organizations were under siege, and arrests were rampant. Several members of Wangari’s family lost their homes, and some, including her mother, were herded into native reserves or emergency villages as part of this sweep (Maathai 2009a, Kanyinga 2009, 328; Elkins 2000, 36).
The KLFA were very active around Wangari’s ancestral home, and members of her family were involved on both sides of the struggle—the revolutionary group or supporters of the home guards, who worked on behalf of the British administration (Maathai 2007a, 64–65). Her time in boarding school ensured that she was spared many of the challenges attached to the uprising. However, as a girl of seventeen, she was picked up while making the trip to Nakuru during her school holidays to visit her father and detained in an emergency village. She was questioned for two days and later released at the intervention of Mr. Neylan. Even though she was insulated from a considerable part of the events, she noted the trauma suffered by others who were not so lucky (65–69). Her time at St. Cecilia’s lasted almost the entire duration of the KLFA revolution. She acknowledged that living in the boarding school bubble gave her an inaccurate and tarnished understanding of the KLFA for a long time. She regarded its members as enemies of the people or terrorists, as the British administration characterized them, even praying with others at St. Cecilia’s for their defeat (64).
It was also while at St. Cecilia’s that Wangari converted to Catholicism and took the name Mary Josephine in honor of Mary and Joseph, the parents of Jesus (Maathai 2007a, 61). Prior to that, as a Protestant, she had been baptized and given the name Miriam (2007b). Even as a young girl, the combination of spiritualities that would inform her philosophy was being nurtured. In this process of spiritual and political sensitization, she remained close to the land, cultivating her plot and communing with its spirituality during her breaks from school (Maathai 2007a, 69).
Entering the Catholic school determined the trajectory of Mary Josephine’s future academic journey and would later influence her theorizing and value system. She took the Kenya African Preliminary Examination in 1955 and obtained top marks. In 1956, the same year that she entered Loreto Girls High School in Limuru (a prestigious Catholic school for African girls), the KLFA revolt finally started to wind down, culminating with the seizure of Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi in October (Branch 2010, 203).
Mary Josephine entered young adulthood in a charged political environment, as the nationalist movement was picking up pace across the continent (Maathai 2007a, 73). Kenyatta was released from jail in Lokitaung and placed under house arrest in Lodwar in 1959 (Nyangena 2003, 4), the same year she graduated from Loreto. She excelled in the Cambridge School Certificate examinations, earning a first division. On January 12, 1960, the state of emergency officially ended, and Britain announced plans to prepare Kenya for majority African governance. This was the Kenya that Mary Josephine left behind on her first trip out of the country as part of the Kennedy Airlift project, in which Kenyans received scholarships to study at universities in the United States (Nyangena 2003, 73; Speich
