Wangari Maathi, first African woman to win Nobel Peace Prize, dies

Wangari Maathi, the first African woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize, has died.

She was 71.

Wangari Maathi dies

Maathi, psssed away after a long battle with cancer, sources said.

The activist

Maathi was an activist who won the Noble Peace Prize for environmentalism and social activism.

She is the founder of the Green Belt Movement where she galvanized poor women to plant 30 million trees. Her work aimed to improve the lives of women, build a relationship between people, the land, and education.

In recognizing Maathai, the Nobel committee said that she had stood up to a former oppressive regime – a reference to former Kenyan President Daniel arap Moi – and that her “unique forms of action have contributed to drawing attention to political oppression.”

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Maathai said during her 2004 acceptance speech that the inspiration for her life’s work came from her childhood experiences in rural Kenya, where she witnessed forests being cleared and replaced by commercial plantations, which destroyed biodiversity and the capacity of forests to conserve water.

Greenbelt Movement

She authored four books: The Green Belt Movement; Unbowed: A Memoir; The Challenge for Africa; and Replenishing the Earth. As well as having been featured in a number of books, she and the Green Belt Movement were the subject of a documentary film, Taking Root: the Vision of Wangari Maathai (Marlboro Productions, 2008).

Maathai was born in 1940 in Nyeri, a rural area of Kenya, Africa. She obtained a degree in Biological Sciences from Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas in 1964, a Master of Science degree from the University of Pittsburgh in 1966, and pursued doctoral studies in Germany and at the University of Nairobi, before obtaining a Ph.D. in 1971 from the University of Nairobi, where she also taught veterinary anatomy.

She is the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree who became chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy and an associate professor in 1976 and 1977 respectively. In both cases, she was the first woman to attain those positions in the region.