Unbowed: One Woman’s Story
by Wangari Muta Maathai
William Heinemann ₤17.99, 352 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤14.39

When news broke in October 2004 that the Nobel Peace Prize had gone to Wangari Maathai, it put many Kenyans in something of a quandary. On the surface, this seemed an occasion for unalloyed celebration. It was the first such prize for black Africa - excluding South Africa - and it had gone to a Kenyan. But the prize’s committee, in its wisdom, had chosen a woman activist whose bellicosity had appalled male politicians over the years. What’s more, she was being honoured for work regarded by the establishment as a worthy irrelevance at best and a sheer nuisance at worst - planting trees in a bid to slow down Kenya’s environmental degradation.

That unease has never really gone away. In the three years since the announcement, Kenyan politicians have learnt to mouth platitudes about Maathai’s work, but she remains more admired and influential abroad. The memoirs of this ecological prophet have, accordingly, been written with western and Kenyan audiences in mind. The danger with such books is that they can miss two targets, by being not specific enough for local audience and too detailed for the international reader. It is a trap that Unbowed does not always skirt.

Maathai was born a member of the Kikuyu, Kenya’s most economically successful ethnic group. In many ways her environmental commitment reflects her roots, for the Kikuyu have always been famous for their attachment to the soil. Their fury at its confiscation by British settlers triggered the Mau Mau uprising of the 1950s.

Lucid and accessible, Maathai’s writing captures the peasant’s sheer delight in the fertile earth: “Wet enough that you could make a ball with it... when you rubbed it between your fingers, you could almost feel the life it held.” As a child, she played by a stream spurting from a fig tree’s roots, sheltered from the rain under the arrowroot’s giant leaves and trailed her fingers in frogspawn. By adulthood, the land-clearing associated with Kenya’s exploding population had eliminated her favourite tree, stream and frogspawn. Maathai noticed, registered cause and effect, and determined to do something about it.

Africa’s farmers are mostly female, and the young Wangari did her share of coffee-picking. But gender stereotypes broke down in the Mau Mau uprising, when thousands of Kikuyu men were detained. Wangari’s mother defied tradition and sent her to school with the boys. At 20, as a star pupil, she was picked for the Kennedy airlift, a programme that brought 600 Kenyan students to study in the US.

She returned home after Kenyan independence in 1963, intent on putting her biology degree to use. It was then that her education truly began. The professor who offered her a university position decided, on second thoughts, to give it to a fellow tribesman. This nepotistic act (her first taste of the tribalism that has long warped Kenya) was so unremarkable that no one apologised. She joined the University of Nairobi anyway, thanks to the intervention of a kindly German professor, and became the first woman in east Africa to win a doctorate. She then rose up the ranks of academia.

Kenya’s history has been one of looting, with only the predators altering over time - today they are the black elite rather than white settlers. One of the “grabbed” resources has been land, and Maathai’s creation of the Green Belt Movement - a grassroots environmental organisation - was prompted by her realisation of the damage caused as forests were felled, topsoil was washed away and rivers dried. Arguing that “you don’t need a diploma to plant a tree”, she established a network of women’s groups, schools and churches whose members planted and nurtured seedlings for minimal payment.

A woman who could impress foreign donors and talk to ordinary folk, she was a natural for the non-governmental sector. But in 1979 fate taught her another lesson, when her politician husband left her. In conservative Kenya, a divorcee is a disreputable figure. His decision to divorce her, in a much-publicised trial, for being “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control” gave to her enemies in President Daniel arap Moi’s government a stick to beat her with for the next decade and a half.

The following years would see a series of clashes with authority - over Kenya’s faltering democratic process, over plans by the ruling party to build on Nairobi’s Uhuru Park, over ethnic clashes condoned by the administration and over land grabbing. Roughed up and arrested repeatedly, she became familiar with police cells.

Her story illustrates what turns ordinary folk into troublemakers. In the west, a woman such as Maathai would have been left to quietly excel in her field. Under a dictatorship, no line divides the personal from the political. To the patriarchal, narrow-minded Moi administration, her high-profile divorce and her unfeminine feistiness were political acts, and she had to be crushed.

Today she faces more complex challenges. When she won the Nobel, Kenyan commentators urged Maathai to quit her position in the government that succeeded Moi’s, arguing that the award placed her above the political fray. They have been vindicated by the ugly turn Kenyan politics have taken. In the eyes of a jaundiced public, President Mwai Kibaki and his sleazy Kikuyu coterie have simply replaced a patronage system that rewarded Moi’s Kalenjin community with one that benefits the Kikuyu.

Nominally holding the post of assistant minister of environment, Maathai snubbed the swearing-in ceremony, refusing to accept the job. But she will have to take more forceful action if she is to avoid being tainted by association with an administration that is guilty of precisely the tribal favouritism she claims to abhor.

Michela Wrong is author of “I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation” (HarperPerennial).