Wangari maathai biography unbowed

Unbowed: A Memoir is a 2006 autobiography written by 2004 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Wangari Maathai.
In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her extraordinary life.
The compelling autobiography of Wangari Maathai, Kenyan peace activist and environmentalist, who in 2004 became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace.

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Unbowed My Autobiography

About this book

Born in a rural Kenyan village in 1940, Wangari Maathai was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most African girls then were uneducated. In her remarkable and inspiring autobiography, she tells of her studies with Catholic missionaries, earning bachelors and master's degrees in the United States, and becoming the first woman both to earn a PhD and to head a university department in Kenya. She tells of her numerous run-ins with the brutal government of Daniel arap Moi and of the political and personal reasons that compelled her, in 1977, to establish the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa, and which helps restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant trees in their villages.

Maathai's extraordinary courage and determination helped transform Kenya's government into the democracy in which she now serves as Deputy Minister for the Environment and Natural Resources and as a Member of Parliament. Eventually her achievement was in

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Unbowed: A Memoir

Maathai, the winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and a single mother of three, recounts her life as a political activist, feminist, and environmentalist in Kenya. Born in a rural village in 1940, she was already an iconoclast as a child, determined to get an education even though most girls were uneducated. We see her become the first woman both in East and Central Africa to earn a PhD and to head a university department in Kenya. We witness her numerous run-ins with the brutal Moi government; the establishment, in 1977, of the Green Belt Movement, which spread from Kenya across Africa and which helps restore indigenous forests while assisting rural women by paying them to plant trees in their villages; and how her courage and determination helped transform Kenya's government into the democracy in which she now serves.--From publisher description.

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Africa celebrates Wangari Maathai Day every March, on the same day as Africa Environment Day, in honour of the continent’s first female Nobel Peace Prize Winner. There are particular reasons to note it this year, as it is the tenth anniversary of Maathai’s death and a good time to remember her legacy. With that in mind, I thought I’d re-read and review her 2006 auto-biography, Unbowed.

Born in 1940 into colonial Kenya, Maathai grew up on a farm in the Rift Valley – not far from where I spent my own teenage years. She was lucky to get the education she did, not least because this was the time of the Mau Mau uprising. The British authorities had placed over a million of her fellow Kikuyus in concentration camps in order to try and keep a lid on the movement for independence. (This was the 1950s, the queen was Elizabeth II, and the government still doesn’t like to talk about these things.) Despite being arrested and held in a camp at one point, Maathai retained her freedom and her scholarship to a Catholic high school. From there, she won a place