Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai was a Kenyan environmentalist, political activist, and academic who founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977 and in 2004 became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was born Wangari Muta on April 1, 1940, in Ihithe village, Nyeri District, in the central highlands of British Kenya, and she died on September 25, 2011, in Nairobi.

Her education took her to the United States as part of the Kennedy Airlift program, and she earned a BS from Mount St. Scholastica College in Kansas in 1964 and an MS from the University of Pittsburgh in 1966. She returned to Kenya and in 1971 became the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a PhD, with a doctorate in veterinary anatomy from the University of Nairobi. She subsequently served as chair of the university's Department of Veterinary Anatomy.

Her founding of the Green Belt Movement in 1977 grew from her work with the National Council of Women of Kenya. The movement organized rural women to plant trees against deforestation and soil erosion, and by the time of the Nobel Prize had planted more than thirty million trees across Kenya. Her activism brought her into repeated conflict with the government of Daniel arap Moi through the 1980s and 1990s; she was arrested several times and was beaten by police and hired men during protests against land grabs in Karura Forest and Uhuru Park.

Her political career advanced after the 2002 elections, when she was elected to the Kenyan parliament for the constituency of Tetu and appointed assistant minister for environment and natural resources. The 2004 Nobel committee cited her contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace. Her later books included the memoir Unbowed (2006) and The Challenge for Africa (2009). She died of complications of ovarian cancer in 2011 at age 71.

Her name Wangari is a Kikuyu name from the Anjiru clan, one of the nine traditional Kikuyu clans, and means a person of the leopard. She used the Kikuyu name throughout her academic and public life, in the form Wangari Muta Maathai in full.