F. Kennedy, was an investment in young East Africans who would help build the postindependence nations. The Catholic Church in Kenya looked to the leading Catholic schools for candidates to participate in the program. Having just graduated with excellent results, Mary Josephine Wangari was an obvious choice. She made the decision to give up an opportunity to study at Makerere University in Kampala, then the premier East African university, and at twenty years of age, Mary Josephine Wangari traveled to the United States to begin her college education at Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas. A series of adjustments would mark not just her life but also that of her country over the ten years that followed.
In 1961, Jomo Kenyatta was released after years of detention, hard labor, and house arrest and assumed the presidency of the political party Kenya African National Union (KANU). In 1963, Kenya gained independence, with Kenyatta elected prime minister on May 27. On June 1, 1963, commemorated as Madaraka Day, Kenya’s first self-governing administration was established, also achieving internal self-rule. Kenya became officially independent in December 1963, and the republic was formed on December 12, 1964, with Kenyatta as its first president. Years later, Maathai recalled, “For me, it was a moment to celebrate that finally we were free, as Martin Luther King was crying out at that time. I thought we were going to enjoy our freedom, we were going to be happy, we were not going to be oppressed anymore. Little did I know what lay ahead” (2005c, 39). Maathai’s combined experiences—of colonialism, the plight of colonized Africans, Kenyans’ agitation for independence, the postindependence situation for Kenyans and especially women, the conditions of African Americans in the United States, and the civil rights era—informed the development of her ideas and ideals, politics and activism. Regarding the civil rights movement, she said, “It shaped my concept of human rights, and it made me understand that human rights are not things that are put on the table for people to enjoy. These are things you fight for, and then you protect” (2009a).
In 1964, Mary Josephine earned her bachelor of science degree in biology from Mount St. Scholastica and proceeded to the University of Pittsburgh for graduate studies. Back in Kenya, the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK) was established as the institution that would coordinate activities of women’s groups and associations. As Kenya had moved toward independence, organizations formerly run by colonial wives and other white women had started handing over the reins to Kenyan women. These included Maendeleo ya Wanawake (MYWO), an organization Maathai would later be a part of and then at odds with, which elected its first African president in 1961. The NCWK was expressly founded to oversee some of these organizations. Maathai later led the NCWK, under whose banner she started the Green Belt Movement (GBM). The NCWK would later launch her into national politics in the 1980s. In 1962, the Kenya Association of University Women (KAUW) was founded as an affiliate of the International Federation of University Women (later renamed Graduate Women International [GWI]). The KAUW, whose membership consisted of women with university degrees from recognized institutions, would propel Maathai into the political and activist spotlight and enable her membership in the NCWK.
As this flurry of political, social, and civic developments related to gender picked up momentum in Kenya, Mary Jo was focused on earning her master of science degree in biological sciences from the University of Pittsburgh, which she did in January 1966. Her thesis, titled “Developmental and Cytological Study of the Pineal Body of Coturnix coturnix japonica,” was adjudged “excellent” by the examining board (Maathai 2007a, 95). Toward the completion of her master’s degree, recruiters from the University College of Nairobi interviewed her in Pittsburgh and followed up with a job offer, asking her to report for duty on January 10, 1966.
Mary Jo returned on January 6, 1966, to a nation and continent where many changes had occurred. Her intention was to take up the position of research assistant to a professor of zoology at the University College of Nairobi, as outlined in her job offer letter. However, upon reporting to work on January 10, she was informed that her promised job had been offered to someone else, which she believed was due to gender and ethnic bias (Maathai 2007a, 100–101). This marked a significant turning point in her career as an academic. She eventually found work under Professor Reinhold Hofmann in the microanatomy section of the newly established Department of Veterinary Anatomy in the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University College of Nairobi.
Two other significant changes happened in 1966. She dropped her “English” names, preferring to go again by her Gikuyu name, Wangari, and she met her future husband, Mwangi Mathai. The name change was part of a conscious embracing of her indigenous Gikuyu and African self that began the disposition of unapologetic Africanness one encounters in her work, words, and self-fashioning. She recounted her shifting sensibilities, specifically on self-identifying and the duality of names and consciousness, in a 2007 interview at the Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, saying, “Later on when I went to school and became a Christian, you were told to adopt a new name, and you were told to accept that as your first name. But it is actually your second name” (2007b). She offered the example of the fact that in Kansas she was addressed as Miss Wangari, which was when she started deconstructing the question of names and naming. She shared a realization about her various name changes: “I had been walking in a zig zag way and I decided to go back to the beginning, and I said, “My name is Wangari!” I decided that from then on, I would try to look at myself using my own mirror and would not allow people to tell me who I was” (2007b).
Wangari Muta started her doctoral studies with encouragement from Professor Hofmann and relocated to Germany on a scholarship under the Nairobi-Giessen partnership program in 1967 to pursue doctoral research and training from the University of Giessen and the University of Munich. At the time there was only one electron microscope in Kenya. Because more were expected to arrive at Kenyan universities, she spent part of her time in Germany extending her experience working with this equipment (Maathai 2007a, 107). In 1969, after twenty months in Germany, she returned to Kenya to the position of assistant lecturer at the University College of Nairobi and to complete her PhD dissertation. In what was a busy year, she married Mwangi Mathai and was immediately thrown into her role as a politician’s wife during his unsuccessful campaign for a seat in parliament.
This was a year of personal and national turmoil. Wangari Mathai experienced great personal loss with the passing of her brother Kibicho, the assassination of government minister Tom Mboya triggered ethnic unrest, and Kenya also became a de facto one-party state after the Kenya People’s Union (KPU) was banned. The KPU’s leader, Oginga Odinga, was arrested, leaving KANU the only party to “compete” in the elections. Later, in the 1970s through the 1990s, this situation would heavily impact Maathai’s politics and political engagements. It also directly impacted the place of her husband in politics and thus Wangari Mathai’s social location. This was the Kenya of her post-Germany return, in which she quickly found her place and voice in her roles as career woman, wife, and mother.
Wangari Muta Mathai completed her PhD dissertation, titled “Early Development of Male Bovine Gonad,” in 1970, the year her first son, Waweru, was born. She was awarded a degree in anatomy from the University College of Nairobi in 1971 (Maathai 2007a, 112), the year she gave birth to her daughter, Wanjira. Wangari Mathai was the first woman in East and Central Africa to receive a doctoral degree. She rejoined the faculty at the university as senior lecturer of anatomy. In 1974, her second son, Muta, was born, and her husband won the parliamentary elections to become the member of parliament (MP) for Lang’ata Constituency. Here began her more active public life and advocacy, informed and motivated by her identities as academic, mother, and public servant.
Even as she supported her husband’s political career, her own professional journey witnessed an upward trajectory in the mid-1970s. She became a senior lecturer in anatomy in 1975, chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy in 1976, and in 1977 she was promoted to associate professor (Maathai 2007a, 118). She was the first African woman in the department to hold those positions, all while enduring and fighting against constant gender bias from both students and faculty members, including some who openly or indirectly questioned her competence. Outside the university, she worked for various civic organizations, including the KAUW and the local Environment Liaison Centre. In 1974, she was
