Planting the Trees
of Kenya: The Story of Wangari Maathai by Claire A. Nivola
As Wangari
Maathai tells it, when she was growing up on a farm in the hills of central
Kenya, the earth was clothed in its dress of green.
Fig trees,
olive trees, crotons, and flame trees covered the land, and fish filled the
pure waters of the streams.
The fig tree
was sacred then, and Wangari knew not to disturb it, not even to carry its
fallen branches home for firewood. In
the stream near her homestead where she went to collect water for her mother,
she played with glistening flogs’ eggs, trying to gather them like beads into
necklaces, though they slipped through her fingers back into the clear water.
Her heart was
filled with the beauty of her native Kenya when she left to attend a college
run by Benedictine nuns in America, far, far from her home. There she studied biology, the science of
living things. It was an inspiring time
for Wangari. The students in America in
those years dreamed of making the world better.
The nuns, too, taught Wangari to think not just of herself but of the
world beyond herself.
How eagerly
she returned to Kenya! How full of hope
and of all that she had learned!
She had been away for five years, only five years, but
they might have been twenty – so changed was the landscape of Kenya.
Wangari found
the fig tree cut down, the little stream dried up, and no trace of frogs,
tadpoles, or the silvery beads of eggs.
Where once there had been little farms growing what each family needed
to live on and large plantations growing tea for import, now almost all the
farms were growing crops to sell.
Wangari noticed that the people no longer grew what they ate but bought
food from stores. The store food was
expensive, and the little they could afford was not as good for them as what
they had grown themselves, so that children, even grownups, were weaker and
often sickly.
She saw that
where once there had been richly wooded hills with grazing cows and goats, now
the land was almost treeless, the woods gone.
So many trees had been cut down to clear the way for more farms that
women and children had to walk farther and farther in search of firewood to
heat a pot or warm the house. Sometimes
they walked for hours before they found a tree or bush to cut down. There were fewer and fewer trees with each
one they cut, and much of the land was as bare as a desert.
Without trees
there were no roots to hold the soil in place.
Without trees there was no shade.
The rich topsoil dried to dust, and the “devil wind” blew it away. Rain washed the loose earth into the
once-clear streams and rivers, dirtying them with silt.
“We have no
clean drinking water,” The women of the
countryside complained, “no firewood to cook with. Our goats and cows have nothing to graze on,
so they make little milk. Our children
are hungry and we are poorer than before.”
Wangari saw
that the people who had once honored fig trees and now cut them down had
forgotten to care for the land that fed them.
Now the land, weak and suffering, could no longer take care of the people,
and their lives became harder than ever.
The women
blamed others, they blamed the government, but Wangari was not one to
complain. She wanted to do
something. “Think of what we ourselves
are doing,” she urged the women. “We are
cutting down the trees of Kenya.
“When we see
that we are part of the problem,” she said, “we can become part of the
solution.”
She had a
simple and big idea.
“Why not plant
trees?” she asked the women.
She showed
them how to collect tree seeds from the trees that remained. She taught them to prepare the soil, mixing
it with manure. She showed them how to
wet that soil, press a hole in it with a stick, and carefully insert a
seed. Most of all she taught them to
tend the growing seedlings, as if they were babies, watering them twice a day
to make sure they grew strong.
It wasn’t
easy. Water was always hard to come
by. Often the women had to dig a deep
hole by hand and climb into it to haul heavy bucketfuls of water up over their
heads and back out of the hole. An early
nursery in Wangari’s backyard failed; almost all the seedlings died. But Wangari was not one to give up, and she
showed others how not to give up.
Many of the
women could not read or write. They were
mothers and farmers, and no one took them seriously.
But they did
not need schooling to plant trees. They
did not have to wait for the government to help them. They could begin to change their own lives.
All this was
heavy work, but the women felt proud.
Slowly, all around them, they could begin to see the fruit of the work
of their hands. The woods were growing
up again. Now when they cut down a tree,
they planted two it its place. Their
families were healthier, eating from the fruit trees they had planted and from
the vegetable plots filled again with the yams, cassava, pigeon peas, and sorghum
that grew so well. They had work to do,
and the work brought them together as one, like the trees growing together on
the newly wooded hills.
The men saw
what their wives, mothers, and daughters were doing and admired them and even
joined in.
Wangari gave
seedlings to the schools and taught the children how to make their own
nurseries.
She gave
seedlings to inmates of prisons and even to soldiers. “You hold your gun,” she told the soldiers, “but
what are you protecting? The whole
country is disappearing with the wind and wter.
You should hold the gun in your right hand and a tree seedling in your
left. That’s when you become a good
soldier.”
And so in the thirty
years since Wangari began her movement, tree by tree, person by person, thirty
million trees have been planted in Kenya—and the planting has not stopped.
“When the soil
is exposed,” Wangari tells us, “it is crying out for help, it is naked and
needs to bec clothed in its dress. That
is the nature of the land. It needs
color, it needs its cloth of green.”
Plus Author’s Note
