Wangari Maathai by Tabitha Kanogo

Wangari Maathai by Tabitha Kanogo

Author:Tabitha Kanogo [Kanogo, Tabitha]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2020-06-14T16:00:00+00:00


4

Urban Warrior

Karura Forest, Uhuru Park, and Mothers of Political Prisoners, 1989–2002

If we are going to shed blood because of our land we will. We are used to that. Our forefathers shed blood for our land. We will do so. This is my blood.

—Wangari Maathai, Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai, film, 2015

She was disobedient at a time when disobedience was not tolerated.

—Professor Vertistine Mbaya, in Taking Root

Although the GBM largely operated in rural Kenya, Maathai’s environmental concerns also extended to urban areas. In fact, that is where Maathai fought her fiercest environmental advocacy battles. In urban areas, especially in the slums, massive unemployment and the resultant financial strain, squalid living conditions, and a general lack of basic social amenities (including running water, working sewage infrastructure, and recreational grounds) were all too common. Although most writings on Wangari Maathai focus on her campaign to conserve the environment by planting millions of trees, the urban concrete jungle did not escape her attention. Nairobi, Kenya’s capital city, was the site of two of her most ferocious environmental battles.

Nairobi was founded by Britain in 1899 as a colonial railway terminus. In 1905, it became the administrative capital of the British East Africa Protectorate, as Kenya was known from 1895 to 1920. Between 1920 and 1963, Kenya was a colony, and Nairobi was its capital, as it remains today. Initially envisioned as a white enclave, the town evolved into a racialized, gendered, and segregated space, with Europeans occupying the higher and well-drained neighborhood and Asians and Africans confined to the low-lying, poorly drained, and malarial areas. In the colonial mind-set, Africans and Asians were quickly associated with a lack of hygiene and the proliferation of disease.1

From the very beginning, the majority of Africans in Nairobi created unplanned, informal settlements that lacked proper infrastructure such as drainage, roads, and social amenities.2 When the colonial government finally provided housing for Africans, it was inadequate in both quality and quantity. Opposed to the possibility of having a “detribalized” and permanent African population in the urban area, the government constructed small houses for the “single” African male worker, who was expected to return to his rural base if he retired, lost his employment, or became unable to work due to ill health. But despite official efforts to discourage and control rural-to-urban migration, Africans moved into Nairobi in droves, outstripping the housing and employment opportunities to be found there. In the city, most Africans subsisted in an informal sector composed of small-scale traders, artisans, and food vendors. Their quarters were overcrowded, dirty, and impoverished.

For Maathai, conflict revolved around the integrity of Uhuru Park, the major recreational ground for the urban poor, and Karura Forest, a swath of pristine greenery in the elite section north of Nairobi, both of which were threatened with excision for development by politicians and private enterprises.3 She knew it would not be a quick or easy task to prevent this excision. Yet she also understood that “every person who has ever achieved anything has been knocked down many times .



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