>From New Scientist magazine, 22 July 2000. No, Mr President Wangari Maathai could have been one of Kenya's leading scientists. But 25 years ago, the first woman to get a biology doctorate in East Africa shed her white coat for the life of an environmental activist. Her mission: to help poor women farmers reclaim desert land by planting trees. Kenya is not the world's most eco-friendly country. And Maathai has often paid dearly for her confrontations with the government of President Daniel Arap Moi: she's been beaten up, had countless death threats and for a time had to go into hiding. Undeterred, she tried unsuccessfully to challenge Moi at the polls two years ago. Why does she do it? Fred Pearce went to Nairobi to find out How did you become a scientist? I can thank an Irish Catholic nun for that. She was my teacher and always wanted me to help set up laboratory demonstrations. I loved her. She thought I would make a good scientist so when I went to college that's what I did. I became the first woman to get a masters in biological sciences in eastern Africa, and then the first to get a PhD. It sounds like you had a glittering academic career ahead, so how did you end up an environmental activist? In the 1970s, I was doing research into ticks as vectors for east coast fever at the University of Nairobi's School of Veterinary Medicine. I wanted to know the prevalence of the parasite among animals, so I'd go to farms and collect ticks to find the rate of infection. I felt I was doing useful work, but when I spoke to farmers their real problems were not the tick but the availability of water, the productivity of the soils and the shortage of fuelwood. There had been a big conference in Stockholm in 1972 which had voted to set up the UN Environment Programme here in Nairobi. Environment groups were also being set up. One was the Environmental Liaison Centre, established to provide a contact point between national environmental non- governmental organisations and the UN environment agency. It needed local people. I joined and got hooked. I also became involved with the National Council for Women of Kenya and would listen to the women from rural areas talking about these problems. The scientist in me began to wonder about the cause of their problems and the solutions. I could see that if you destroy your forests, your topsoils are washed away and your rivers dry up. I said to the rural women, you can protect them by planting trees on your own farm. Trees are good for fencing, for building timber, for fruit--and good for the environment, too. That was how the Green Belt Movement was born. But why go full-time as an activist? I had no choice. I was forced out. The university told me I could either be an activist or an academic. I had become very militant, not just about the environment. I felt academic freedom at the university was being interfered with by politicians. I was chairman of my department, so I sat in the university Senate. They argued that I couldn't both make decisions and belong to a trade union. We went to court and we lost. It was in the course of that that I eventually lost my position. I was given an option and I resigned. Did you ever regret that? In the beginning I felt I was wasting my time. But later, the politicians took over the university. It was the beginning of an interference that eventually led to the death of our universities. They started promoting on the basis of political connections. Eventually academic staff lost all the power they had. That remains the position today. What do you say to young scientists who ask you if they should stay in the universities? I think it is important for people to stay there, to continue pushing for their freedom. We need a constitution that will give academics their freedom, to stop politicians coming in and interfering or using the institutions to promote their own political agendas. So you swapped academia for the Green Belt Movement, your own invention. What does it do? We have spent more than 20 years trying to avert desertification in Kenya by planting trees. And we have done this especially through helping poor rural women to plant trees on their farms, by paying them small amounts for what they plant. And we have also spoken out on environmental issues. How have you funded the organisation? It has been hard to get people to fund advocacy because that criticises government. We have had to suffer for that. At one stage, the government shut down our offices. Anybody who wanted favours from the government would not support us. So we have relied a lot on outside agencies, including Comic Relief--the charity established by TV comedians in Britain. We do a lot of work without pay. A lot of people are eager to make it more professional, but I am a bit scared of that-you may remove the spirit that made it. People come here and ask how they can become a member. I say go and plant a tree. If it survives, you are a member, if it dies, you are out. You have recently tried to set up Green Belt movements in other African countries . . . Yes, Comic Relief is funding these. We in Africa have been accused of mismanaging our resources, of not caring for our people. We bring people from other countries here and show them what we have done and they go back home and devote themselves to the protection of their own environment. What are your biggest successes? We have planted a lot of trees. More than 20 million now. I think the biggest achievement is raising public awareness about the need to take the environment seriously and linking the environment to many of the problems they experience in their lives. Also, we have taken the environment issue into the heart of power and made decision makers consider it as something other than a trivial issue about women planting trees. And failures? We feel we have campaigned successfully to convince farmers to manage their land well, to protect their forests and so on. But we've not done enough to change the perception that the government owns the public resources. One reason there has been so much damage done to forests in this country is because people believe they belong to the government. Ministers took advantage of that and exploited the forests, sometimes for their own personal benefit. We need to get across that the government is just the custodian, that the public has a stake. So we now want to concentrate on planting trees on public land as a symbol that we are reclaiming highways, village spaces, waterways, marshlands as well as forests. You got headlines worldwide last year when you were arrested and beaten up while occupying a state forest in one of the suburbs of Nairobi . . . Yes, the Karuna Forest. Even though it was a state forest, some people had grabbed it to build on. We stopped them, but they still think they can build one day. They are waiting for us to forget about it, but they'll wait a long time. And new laws will help us. At the time we occupied that land, the law said we couldn't go to court because nothing of ours was being hurt. Now we have that right. And I think that law came about partly because of our pressure over Karuna. Your other famous protest was a decade ago against President Moi's plans for putting up the tallest building in Africa in Nairobi's Uhuru Park. You were named "woman of the world" by Princess Diana, but did you win? At that time, the government was very, very strong and people here thought what we were doing was crazy, certainly risky. We went to court and lost. But they didn't build. We called that place Freedom Corner, and now everybody calls it that. We put up a sign proclaiming it, and nobody has dared take it down. That place belongs to the people. Why have Africans become so alienated from their environment? It is partly the European approach to modernism and to what is valuable. When they came here, Europeans pretended they knew how to manage our resources. Partly as a result, the world still often sees Africans as the enemy of the environment and wildlife. And yet it was the same Africans who had allowed elephants to live on this continent in their millions for so long. It was not until Africans were told by Europeans that they were not utilising their resources properly that we began to destroy the environment. When it comes to the media of the rich countries, Africa is all bad news stories. Are you worried about that negative image? Yes, of course. We get very embarrassed. Our problem is we have governments that are not interested in their own citizens. For example, after what has been happening in Ethiopia with the famine this year, I couldn't help wondering what Bob Geldof was thinking. So much was done from all over the world through his help. You'd have thought it couldn't happen there again. But right now, Ethiopia's leaders are much more interested in fighting Eritrea than feeding their own people. But we are also sometimes blamed for things we haven't done. One example is international debt. It is very easy to blame Africans for that. Yet we also know the role that the rich nations have played in making these debts what they are. We know the support that our dictatorial leaders received from those nations. At a time when people like me were being thrown out of the universities for speaking up, while some became refugees or went to jail and died, nobody in the West wanted to hear about human rights in Africa because the international agenda was the cold war. Now Western leaders say, you Africans, can't you ever get your act together? Well, we would if you wouldn't keep helping the people who are making a mess of it here. So what is the solution? People have to learn to take charge. The nobles of Europe didn't decide the serfs needed to be free. People had to fight for it--to cut off heads, sometimes. Africans have not yet learned that they have to fight for their rights. You ran for president in 1997. Why? Until the opposition unites it will be difficult to dislodge the system. In 1992, I had campaigned to forge a common front, called the Middle Ground group. But all the different opposition leaders wanted to be president. So in 1997 I decided to stand as a unity candidate. But the night before the election, word went round that I had withdrawn. Even the BBC reported it the following morning without checking with me. This meant that I didn't get enough votes to proceed to the next round of voting. What do you feel about genetically modified crops? The sad thing about the Europeans and their technical advances is that they are so arrogant. Sometimes they are right and sometimes they are wrong. By the time the damage is done, they have the knowledge, skills and capital to reverse the damage. But those they have taught often don't. That is what is happening with GM technology. It is very easy for Monsanto to bring the technology here and to distribute it through government institutions such as KARI, the Kenyan agricultural research institute. KARI is very well-meaning. But if that technology proves harmful, KARI and the government will not have the wherewithal to recover. Meanwhile, Monsanto will be nowhere to be seen. It is that vulnerability that makes me feel that we Africans need to learn to be a little bit careful, and not continue being used as guinea pigs. ************************************************************** Danial Irfachsyad [EMAIL PROTECTED] Department of Chemistry University of Southampton ************************************************************** --------------------------------------------------------------------- Mulai langganan: kirim e-mail ke [EMAIL PROTECTED] Stop langganan: kirim e-mail ke [EMAIL PROTECTED] Archive ada di http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]
