Voices of Liberation Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai was a scholar, writer, environmental activist, human rights champion, and Nobel Prize laureatte. In her life and thought, she tenaciously sought to expose the precarious lives of people across a variety of communities: women, rural communities, political prisoners, Kenyans, Africans, and citizens of the global South saddled with the burdens of international debt.

HSRC Press

Product Information

Format:

210mm x 148mm

Pages:

352

ISBN-13:

978-0-7969-2574-9

Publish Year:

November 2019

Rights:

World Rights

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations and acronyms

Timeline of the life of Wangari Maathai

Part 1 Her life

Introduction

Early life: Under the mugumo tree

The National Council of Women of Kenya

Electoral politics

Countering colonial cultures of nature

Green Belt Movement

Defending Uhuru Park and Karura Forest

Release Political Prisoners

Parliament and beyond

Nobel Peace Prize, 2004

Conclusion: Planting sustainable futures

Part 2 Her voice: Selected writings of Wangari Maathai

Beginnings

Foresters without Diplomas

The Power of the Tree

The Commitment to Service

Environment and Development

References

Nobel Prize Speech

Rise up and Walk! The Third Annual Nelson Mandela Lecture, 19 July 2005

Moving the Social Machine

Part 3 Her legacy

Can the Earth Be Belted?

Bron Tyler

Kenya’s Green Belt Movement

Bron Tyler

Slow Violence, Gender and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Rob Nixon

Stranger in the Ecovillage: Race, Tourism and Environmental Time

Rob Nixon

Wangari Maathai Was Not a Good Woman

Nanjala Nyabola

Conclusion

Grace A Musila

Select bibliography

About the editor

Index

Grace A Musila is an associate professor at the Department of African Literature, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. She is the author of A Death Retold in Truth and Rumour: Kenya, Britain and the Julie Ward Murder (James Currey/Boydell & Brewer, 2015); which explores Kenyan and British interpretations of the 1988 murder of British tourist Julie Ann Ward in Maasai Mara Game Reserve, Kenya. She also co-edited Rethinking Eastern African Intellectual Landscapes (Africa World Press, 2012) with James Ogude and Dina Ligaga. She writes on East and Southern African literatures and popular culture with a keen interest on how gender inflects both lived experience and knowledge production in Africa. In this regard, Wangari Maathai is a figure of great interest for Musila, owing to her rich life and thoughts on the intersections between gender, natural resources and state power in Africa, and how they determine the scope of freedom available to women, children and vulnerable communities.