On Becoming a River

If there’s a cardinal rule for Kenyan theatre aficionados in the 21st century, it is this: if you are in Nairobi and Too Early For Birds is staging a play, you drop everything, you shove your hard earned shillings into their theatrical pockets and you show up for it. This is a simple (if a tad pricy) hack for winning at Nairobi living. It is what I did a couple of weeks ago when they put on a brilliant production about Wangari Maathai, that late, great national heroine.

This was special.

To the world she was the environmentalist who built an incredible grassroots movement and became the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. To me, as a Kenyan woman, she is a testament to what it means to live a life of unwavering conviction and steadfast action.

I came of age during a fraught chapter in Kenya’s history, crossing into adulthood a generation after we had gained independence at a time when we were deep in the throes of a dictatorial regime. We were a fearful people then, forever glancing furtively over our shoulders, backs hunched, tongues reeled in, eyes darting back and forth, weighed down by a thick cloud of oppression.

In the midst of that dark chapter, Wangari Maathai was one among a precious few who would not be intimidated and would not be silenced. Such a nuisance, such a pebble in the shoe of the Moi government, that Members of Kenya’s Parliament once used a parliamentary procedure reserved for national emergencies to interrupt their normal proceedings in order to rail against her for 45 minutes.

Wangari Maathai lent us her courage while we cultivated our own and for that she will always be a national hero.

The afterglow of the Too Early For Birds excursion led me back to her memoir, hankering for deeper engagement with the story of this extraordinary woman: who she was and how she came to be who she was. Which is how I found her profound personal thesis about The Making of The Wangari Maathai. (Working title mine, thesis hers.)

Wangari Maathai understood herself, in great wisdom and true humility, as part of something bigger: an actor within an ecosystem which fed her as she poured into it. The river that fed the ocean that fed the clouds that fell over the mountains that fed the river. As she surveyed her life after her Nobel Prize win, she saw the multitude of people, the providential events and path-altering circumstances that had fed into it to shape who she became and direct the course that she took.

A great river always begins somewhere, she mused. An insignificant spring becomes a stream which flows on until it meets other tributaries and together they become a river. She saw who she became as the confluence of the numerous and diverse streams. You cannot understand the river if you do not recognise the streams that feed it.

An early stream that fed her was her heritage and her upbringing, a father who was an avid tree planter and a Mugumo tree from which a stream sprung and around which she grew up playing. For years this stream flowed steady beneath the surface, real but unseen, patiently forging its way toward the river.

Then downstream the river grew, gradually, and then suddenly.

First an unexpected but welcome invitation to join the Kenyan board of the Environment Liaison Centre, an international organisation set up to ensure the participation of nongovernmental organisations in the work of UNEP whose headquarters had been established in Nairobi. She was not environmentally savvy when she began this work, but her voluntary work with ELC, which included a 10 year stint as chair of the board, expanded her knowledge of environmental issues multiplefold.

Meanwhile, she was conducting postdoctoral research on the parasite responsible for East Coast Fever, a disease fatal to imported cattle. While doing research in rural Kenya she noticed that the rivers would rush down the hillsides and along paths and roads when it rained, muddy with silt. At the foothills of Mt Kenya, she saw rivers silted, top soil flowing from the mountain’s forests where plantations of commercial trees had replaced indigenous forests and huge swathes of land previously covered by forest had been replaced by tea and coffee. She had gone looking for a biological remedy to farmers’ problems. She came away with the conviction that the cattle she studied were more threatened by environmental factors than biological ones.

Concurrently, Wangari Maathai became involved with the National Council of Women of Kenya, an umbrella organisation that unified women’s groups in the country. Through the NCWK she learned about the challenges of rural women and slowly fortified her conviction that the challenges they were facing had mostly (though not only) to do with the degradation of the environment.

At around the same time her husband ran for parliament. She campaigned alongside him and together they promised to create employment for the people of their constituency. Once the election was won, however, her husband lost interest in fulfilling this promise. Wangari was mortified. When she made a promise, she expected to keep it. She launched Envirocare Ltd, intending to employ these jobless constituents to take care of the gardens of the rich and to plant trees. Unfortunately, Envirocare did not last, it ran a short and troubled course then disintegrated. But a crucial part of it flowed into the great river: the concept of tree planting.

So while her environmental knowledge, vision and imagination were expanding through her work at Environmental Liaison Centre, she was simultaneously noticing the adverse effects of environmental degradation through her post doctoral workstream, was developing a conviction to act in tandem with conversations at the NCWK and was trying to put into practice what she had learned through Envirocare.

All the while the river was flowing, the river was growing.

There’s something at once mystical and earthy about rivers.

Wangari Maathai invokes a rich Kenyan heritage when she draws on the river as the ultimate symbol of life itself: from Margaret Ogolla’s The River and the Source, a multigenerational epic tale of womanhood and familyhood, to Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s tale of the clash between new and old, and the people caught in the middle, in The River Between.

Wangari’s leaning into the metaphor calls our attention to the ecosystem that birthed her, nurtured her and shaped her into who she became. With it she links her story inexorably to other people’s stories, lesser known, but no less crucial. We do not become great rivers in isolation. Our rivers do not spring out of nowhere. They’re fed by tributaries which are fed by numerous little streams that spring in surprising and unsurprising places. This is the cycle of significance, meaning and contribution: someone has come before, someone will walk beside, others will carry it through.

The challenge to us is stark: are we rightly recognising and paying homage to all the tributaries that have fed our rivers? Do we understand that we are not alone in our work and our accomplishments? That others have gone before and yet others work alongside?

One of my favourite anecdotes in Unbowed, the memoir, is of an early Greenbelt Movement symbolic tree planting ceremony to which she invites Senior Chief Josiah Njonjo and the Englishman Richard St Barb Baker of Men of the Trees. Men whom I had never hitherto heard of. It turns out they had begun to promote the planting of trees in Kenya way back in the nineteen twenties. Although their efforts did not yield much fruit, Wangari honours them as those who had gone before and prepared a way, thus challenging us, too, to do the same. Who are our unheard ofs? The ancestors, the helpers, the witnesses? Can you name yours?

I have been thinking, lately, about the little things that made a big difference. Like what it meant for my schoolmates to perform plays and dramatic poems based on scripts that I had written. What it did for my psyche and my sense of self in ways that I did not yet grasp and could not then articulate. Of the classmate who, when I met her decades later at business school, asked me pointed questions about my trajectory. She had known me a long time. She was at the spring that fed the stream that became the tributary that flowed into the river. She was, still is, matter of fact, guardian of a particular truth about me. Her direct question startled, but it was necessary.

I’ve been thinking, too, about the disappointment of journalism school and the doubt that it planted about which way the river ought to flow. Coming to terms, too, with the truth of the river: that though it meanders, it will eventually flow into the ocean.

Lastly I’ve been thinking about how to be more thoughtful and deliberate about the trees I’m nurturing in my source mountains: the books I’m reading, the ideas I’m interacting with, the people I’m spending time with and around, what I’m listening to and watching.

Perhaps the biggest lesson we can all take from Wangari Maathai is that great rivers are dogged in the face of resistance. The great river will make a way because it must. It will find its way to the ocean because that is its destiny. Wangari speaks of sticking with a thing through time and resistance, focusing on what can be done while paying no heed whatsoever to that which is not possible. That, in the end, is her winning formula: sheer doggedness.

But there’s a lesser known twist I found that animated me. She did not travel to Mexico for that inaugural UN Women’s conference. Though the NCWK sent a delegation, she was not yet a significant enough player within it to deserve a place. Nonetheless she took the knowledge, insights and ideas that the Kenyan delegates to the conference brought back and ran with them all the way to a Nobel Peace Prize. There’s a lesson there about understanding the moment, hunkering down and doing the work. It doesn’t matter if you’re not in the room in the first instance, or if you’re confined, at the start, to the nosebleed seats. What matters is what you do with what you learn and how you leverage the moment when the tide is right. Time and opportunity are not diminished because others have a headstart.

So what if I’m older, gunning for a PhD, starting a new business while trying to build a life as a writer, all post 50. Blooming late does not blemish the flower. The meandering river still gets to the ocean.

Cheers to Wangari Maathai, still teaching us how to be free.