Too small a statue: Wangari Mathaai

In front of the statue of the man on the horse

In June 2019, I stood in front of a statue of a man on a horse in the middle of Brussels. This man is the Belgian king called Leopold the second. He was the personal owner of a huge plot of land in Central Africa including the people. He called it the Congo Free State. Amazing how one person could once own a country that was twice as large as the surface of France and Germany combined and 80 times as large as Belgium itself. Leopold forged the nationalist consciousness of millions of Belgians. He united the Belgian people under one flag, using the proceeds from the Congo,. Essentially by paying for statues and attractive public works in Belgium. Rubber production was the money machine behind Leopold’s colonial efforts. He built phenomenal personal wealth through forced labor. A dismal record of atrocities and violence against the people of Congo. Still his statue does not give any clues about the dubious methods to extract riches from Africa. The statue just shows a benign bearded man on a horse. Leopold’s cruel repression contributed to a sharp decline in population in the Congo Free State. His money making machine ordered the physical chopping of hands, when production quota of rubber ran behind schedule. No rubber, no hands. No Nobel prize for Leopold!

Female African activist

In contrast Kenyan born Wangari Mathaai does not have a statue yet. She became the first African black woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Nelson Mandela, F.W. de Klerk, Desmond Tutu and Kofi Anan were African male predecessors. Although I doubt whether she would have wanted a statue (why not?!), she definitely deserves one. Ironically enough, Wangari Mathaai would become the patron of the Congo Basin Forest. Essentially the forest area, that used to be Leopold’s African backyard. So what did Wangari Mathaai’s bumpy road to personal achievement look like? Mathaai increased her chances in life majorly by participating in the Kennedy Airlift, a school exchange program between East Africa and the United States. This scholarship for East Africans granted access to higher education in the US between 1959 and 1960. Tom Mboya, founding father of Kenya and then Senator, later President, John F. Kennedy were the sponsors of this education program. The progress that Kennedy and Mboya realized with this program steered towards more equal opportunity. The changes that Kennedy and Mboya envisioned were not taken lightly by some people. Despite or rather because of their bold ideas, both men would be tragically assassinated. Although the motives behind these murders remain obfuscated and became part of conspiracy theory, it's fair to say that the world was not ready for the type of change that these men embodied.

Assassination more likely than Noble prize

Assassination could have been the faith of Wangari Mathaai as well. She was successful in the end, but not without the hardship. She had to endure threats to her life and seems to have continuously risked imprisonment, simply by upsetting conventional thinking and her very tenacious attitude. Let's say that her being "gutsy" and independent was not appreciated. She had a hard time molding herself to become more acceptable. Just imagine the number of toes she had to trod on, to achieve change. Many legal attacks failed to put her away in jail. In the end some of the "lighter" accusations were deemed serious enough by an African judge to make her spend some time in prison. But luckily only for a short period of time. No wonder she considered the Kennedy Airlift as an opportunity of a lifetime. For an African woman, wanting to develop herself and become independent, the negative pressures were simply huge.

So what did she end up doing to deserve the "Prize of prizes"

After the scholarship in the US, she became an academic, a politician and an ecologist. Her activism was motivated by the ongoing ecological mismanagement of Kenyan fertile soils and forests. Thus she founded The Green Belt Movement. This movement is composed of citizen foresters, primarily female, who learn to combine fertile top soils and tree planting. If done well, this increases both income and ecology. The movement that she started remains fragile. The pressures of global commerce and common agricultural practice are real. So how did she manage to survive and prosper despite adversity? The secret sauce was that during her lifetime she developed a canopy of people to protect her and hence dodged or at least mitigated many attacks. Through her movement, the fight for a more healthy ecology and economy continues. Her life is a testimony to the positive effect of ecological thinking and the positive change that occurs through activist women in our societies. She died in 2011. Her legacy lives on...

Correction of the article's title: "the woman without a statue"

The original title read "the woman without a statue", but that's factually incorrect. "Too small a statue" is a better title. You would expect somebody like Wangari Mathaai to have a statue and actually she does...it's just not in a very known location. The statue is on a college campus in Kansas,...

https://www.greenbeltmovement.org/node/618

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