Unbowed: Autobiography of Wangari Maathai
Thursday, December 14, 2006
By: Haneen Malallah

World Learning Trustee and Nobel Peace Prize Winner 2004

The recently published book Unbowed, is the autobiography of Wangari Maathai, member of the Board of Trustees of World Learning.  Maathai takes her readers through a memoir of her exceptional life in Kenya starting around the mid-twentieth century.  Maathai was born at a time were girls were not educated, yet she insisted on attending primary school, went on to be the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree, and in 2004 became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. 

Unbowed illustrates how Maathai’s life has always been about her country.  She was among the first generation of young professionals who went back to Kenya after studying overseas to help build the newly independent country.

Upon her return, Maathai occupied research and teaching positions at University of Nairobi and quickly became involved in various civil-society groups.  Such roles and participation in public life, defied the “quiet female” stereotype of her time.  Maathai confronted and challenged such labels, fighting for female rights in areas such as equal pay and the right to be involved in all spheres of life.  Leading these fights in the 1970s was no ordinary thing for a woman.  Maathai’s marriage ended in a humiliating public divorce, due, in part, to her husband’s inability to handle a strong partner.

Maathai’s passion for her country is clear throughout her memoir.  Early in the book she says, “I am as much a child of my native soil as I am of my father, Muta Njugi, and my mother, Wanjiru Kibicho.”  This passion translated in Maathai’s compelling need to heal the Kenyan landscape, which now has less than 2% indigenous forest remaining.  Maathai recalls growing up in green highlands, with predictable seasons, allowing for abundant clean water and different crops making hunger “virtually unknown.”  Maathai, in 1977, started the Green Belt Movement that, through a network of rural women, planted over thirty million trees across Kenya.  The movement came in an effort to tackle the alarming rate of deforestation that was a result of hacking of trees to provide for wood for charcoal and to clear land for agriculture.

Unbowed is more than a personal journey of the author, Maathai’s life is so closely intertwined with her country’s realities that this memoir takes the reader through the trials and tribulations of person and a country in which both equally influenced each other in life-changing ways.  To order your copy, Click Here.