“WILL AFRICA’S PROBLEMS be solved by scattering a few seeds to grow trees?” a friend asked me. We were in a bookshop. He’s a writer and an African politician, so I asked why he had decided not to buy Wangari Maathai’s memoir, Unbowed. It struck me as funny that an intelligent man with children should ask whether scattering seed makes a difference.

Maathai is accustomed to being asked whether tree-plant-ing makes a difference. “So, when people learn about my life and the world of the Green Belt Movement and ask me ‘Why trees?’ the truth of the matter is that the question has many answers.”

The Kenyan-born Maathai, known as the “Tree Woman”, won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. She is both the first woman from Africa and the first African from that vast region between Egypt and South Africa to receive it.

The citation commended her courage in standing up against an oppressive regime in Kenya. Her combination of “science, social commitment and active politics” drew attention to environmental-ism as well as political oppression generally, and women’s oppression in particular.

Environmental politics are at the top of the global agenda. So why did my friend ask if planting trees makes a difference? His question probes the relationship between the macro and the micro, the personal and political: precisely what makes Unbowed: One Woman’s Story essential reading.

It traces the impact of the actions of one individual on the global environment. In 1976, Maathai, the first black woman in east and central Africa to earn a doctorate, was teaching at Mak-erere University — another first for a black woman (her life is a story of firsts). Married to an ambitious but inept husband, and bringing up young children, her political work was voluntary.

While she was on the National Council of Women in Kenya (NCWK), the idea of people planting trees took root: “I again proposed planting trees as an activity the NCWK could take on to assist its rural members and so meet women’s needs.” In 1977, she founded the Green Belt Movement, a grassroots women’s organisation. Thirty years later, it has mobilised people around the world, most of them poor, to plant 30 million trees.

Empowerment of others is at the core of her success. Her husband, threatened by her struggle for women’s rights, her achievements and her constant conflict with state power, walked out. He blamed her for the failure of their marriage. “It is always the woman’s fault,” Maathai explains as she quotes his justification for the divorce. She was, he said in court, “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn, and too hard to control”. The judge agreed and she was jailed for publicly criticising him.

The fascination of Unbowed— and the answer to why planting trees might make a difference to the world — lies in its awareness that change begins at home.

Maathai grew up in a village in the Central Highlands of what was then British Kenya in the shadow of Kirinyaga (known to colonials as Mount Kenya). The Kikuyu word for leopard is ngarÍ and the possessive form “of the leopard” is wa-ngarÍ. Her mother encouraged her not to be frightened of this animal: “ ‘If you are walking on the path and you see the leopard’s tail,’ my mother said, ‘be careful not to step on it. Instead, as you keep on walking, tell the leopard, “You and I are both leopards so why would we disagree?” ’ I believed that the leopard would recognise me as wa-ngarÍ and not hurt me, and that I had no reason to fear it.”

But when the adult Maathai tried to talk to the leopard, it wouldn’t listen. She ignored her mother’s advice, and has spent a lifetime metaphorically stepping on its tail. Unbowed is a modern fable about individual responsibility and the importance of challenging received wisdom, dogma and irrational male authority, as well as the punishment meted out to those who challenge masculine power. The logic of Maathai’s position is clear: “The protection of the environment needs to be a personal issue. You cannot protect the environment unless you have that democratic space to pressure and demand.”

This book, ghostwritten by Mia MacDonald and Martin Rowe, is shaped to the chronology of her life, and, as often with narratives of heroic individualism, the people with whom she shared her journey remain hazy. Maathai is clear that personal ethics and responsibility require participation in collective action: “I wanted to place tree planting within the spirit of Jomo Kenyatta’s idea of community mobilisation, which he popularised in the national slogan ‘Harambee!’ (Kiswahili for ‘Let us all pull together’).”

Unbowed eloquently challenges the combustible effects of linking land and ethnicity. Maathai developed a pacifist, ecological counter to the old Mau Mau slogan — not “One settler, one bullet” but “One person, one tree.”

Unbowed, however, excises altogether any mention of a key controversy three years before its publication. A scientist by education, Maathai sparked global debate after the announcement of her Nobel award by repeating conspiracy theories about the origins of HIV and Aids, and endorsing the denialists who reject evidence of a link between the virus and Aids. She has since retracted her comments, and supports attempts to reduce the impact of Aids.

As a prominent African leader, she has a responsibility to speak out about it. Her position paper stating that Aids is the most important political and economic issue in Africa is on the Green Belt Movement website; but you won’t read a word about it here.

Which takes us back to my friend’s question. If Unbowed had also addressed these issues, he would have bought it. Whoever thought that writing about Africa’s biggest crisis of the past 15 years would harm sales, or diminish Maathai’s popularity, could cost an important book a wider readership.

Extract from UNBOWED: One Woman’s Story by Wangari Maathai

On March 7, 2001, I travelled to Wang’uru, a village two hours from Nairobi and not far from Mount Kenya, to join Green Belt members who had been working to raise awareness of the Government’s latest attempts to grab more of Kenya’s forests. We also erected a billboard warning that a village plot was in danger of being grabbed.

After planting a few trees in the village, we moved to a nearby shopping centre. While I spoke about the land-grabbing through a bullhorn from the back seat of the office Land Rover, Green Belt members attempted to collect signatures from the people shopping. Suddenly, the police arrived. Even though the Land Rover was still moving, one officer opened the driver’s door, pushed my driver out of the car, and got behind the steering wheel. I had been carjacked! While other policemen chased away the women who had tried to follow us, the officer drove me to Wang’uru police station. We didn’t say a word to each other as he drove wildly to the police post. When we arrived, he pushed me into a cell and locked me up. Later, I was transferred to a police station where I was thrown into a crowded and filthy cell.

Jail, again. Another night in a dirty, cramped police holding cell. Only two days before, President Moi, opening a women’s seminar in Nairobi, had told the women assembled that “because of your little minds, you cannot get what you are expected to get”. People were appalled and many Kenyans protested. But I knew this attitude all too well. March 8 was International Women’s Day. I could almost smile at the irony.

The Government’s heavy-handed tactics against me backfired. The Green Belt Movement and friends in the US faxed and e-mailed news of my latest arrest to friends and supporters throughout the world. The Kenyan authorities were so bombarded with complaints about my illegal arrest that by the next afternoon they had to charge or release me. I was released without charge.

Unbowed: One Woman's Story by Wangari Maathai

Heinemann, £17.99; 352pp

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