Chapter 1The Soil

Foreword

My beat, for the whole of my working life, has been the Black American writer in the public square. Ellison, the essayists and quarrelers of the post-war decades, the men and women who believed that an argument made well enough, in public, could move a country — that was my territory, and I knew its streets the way you know the streets of the city you grew up in. So when I told people I was writing a book about a Kenyan forester, the reaction was polite and unmistakable. She planted trees, they said. You write about writers. What is the connection?

The connection is the whole book.

Because the figure I had spent my career studying — the intellectual who insists on thinking in public, in a country that would prefer them decorative or silent, and who pays for the insistence in a currency the comfortable never have to carry — is nowhere more fully realized than in Wangari Maathai. Here was a scholar, the holder of a doctorate no woman in her region had held before her, a professor, a woman of committees and lecture halls, who took her argument out of the seminar room and made it out of seedlings. Here was a person a head of state called crazy, in public, by name — and I have read enough of my own country's history to know what it means when power finds it necessary to call a thinking woman crazy. It means she is winning. Ellison wrote about a man whom his country refused to see. Maathai's government spent twenty years trying to unsee her, and she would not permit it.

I expected to write a book about an environmentalist. I did not. The record would not allow it. I worked from what is public and abundant — her own memoir and lectures, the press archives of the Moi years, the court record of a woman who was in and out of courtrooms the way other public figures are in and out of studios, the proceedings of a parliament she eventually joined — and everywhere I looked for trees I found land, and everywhere I looked for land I found power. The forests were not dying of natural causes. They were being spent, the way a corrupt government spends anything it can convert to loyalty. She said this plainly, for decades, and the plainness was the scandal. Anyone can love a forest. She indicted the arrangement that was killing it.

What surprised me most was not the courage, though the courage is nearly unaccountable — a woman standing in a forest while hired men opened her scalp, and coming back. What surprised me was the method. The movement she built ran on women the political system had already dismissed: farmers, grandmothers, women who signed the nursery ledger with a thumbprint, paid a few cents for every seedling that survived. Not for every seedling planted. For every seedling that lived. I have read a great deal of political theory in my life, and I am not sure I have encountered a more rigorous account of accountability than that ledger.

She is worth a book — worth many more books than she has received — because she demonstrated, in soil, an argument my own subjects made in print: that there is no separating the health of a place from the freedom of its people, that a government which strips the one is stripping the other, and that the counter-argument can begin with almost nothing. Seven seedlings in a public park. It ended with a constitution, a Nobel Prize, and a dictatorship outlived.

I came to this book from a different continent and a different quarrel, expecting to admire her from a professional distance. The distance did not survive the research. That is the mark of the great subjects: they enlarge the beat of anyone who studies them honestly. She enlarged mine.

— Solomon Treadway, Chicago

Chapter 1 · The Soil

The land came first. Before the woman, before the movement, before the fifty-one million trees and the Nobel Prize and the police batons that knocked her unconscious in a public park, before any of it, there was the land.

The Central Highlands of Kenya rise from the Rift Valley floor in a long green ascent toward the summit of Mount Kenya, which the Kikuyu call Kirinyaga, the Mountain of Brightness, the place where Ngai, the creator, dwells. The mountain stands at 17,057 feet, the second-highest peak in Africa, and its western slopes descend through zones of bamboo forest and montane heath into a country of red soil, deep river valleys, and a fertility so extravagant that the British who first saw it in the 1890s understood immediately that they would have to take it. The soil was volcanic, deposited over millennia by eruptions from the Rift Valley system that runs like a wound through the eastern half of the African continent, and it could grow anything. Tea, coffee, pyrethrum, maize, beans, bananas, sweet potatoes. The rivers that descended from Mount Kenya's glaciers provided water year-round. The altitude, between five and seven thousand feet, kept the air cool enough to suppress malaria and the tsetse fly that made much of lowland Africa uninhabitable for European settlers. The Central Highlands were, in the calculus of colonial acquisition, perfect.

The Kikuyu had lived on this land for at least four centuries before the British arrived. They were agriculturalists, not pastoralists like the Maasai to the south or the Samburu to the north, but farmers, people whose identity was bound to cultivation, to the relationship between a family and its soil. The Kikuyu word for land, githaka, carried a weight that the English word does not. A githaka was not a commodity. It was not real estate. It was an inheritance that connected the living to the dead and to the unborn, a physical place where ancestors were buried and where their spirits remained, where children would be born and where they too would eventually be laid in the ground. To lose your githaka was not to lose property. It was to lose your place in the chain of existence that stretched backward to the ancestors and forward to the children who had not yet been born. It was, in the Kikuyu understanding of the world, a kind of death.

The Kikuyu also possessed a sophisticated relationship with the forest that European colonizers systematically failed to understand. Indigenous fig trees, mugumo in Kikuyu, were considered sacred dwelling places of Ngai, the creator deity believed to reside on Mount Kenya. These trees were never to be cut down. The Kikuyu elder Mugo wa Kibiru, who prophesied the coming of the white man in the nineteenth century, delivered his warnings at the base of a mugumo. The prohibition on cutting fig trees was not superstition in any dismissive sense; it was a practical ecological rule. The fig tree's deep root systems reached underground water, fed streams, held hillsides, and supported biodiversity, encoded in spiritual language to ensure universal compliance. When Maathai's generation was taught by missionaries that indigenous spiritual beliefs were pagan, the destruction of this cultural prohibition contributed to the destruction of the trees. The loss of the mugumo was not merely theological. It was hydrological.

The British took the land.

They took it methodically, legally, and with the full apparatus of imperial administration. The mechanism was the Crown Lands Ordinance of 1902, which declared all "waste and unoccupied" land to be the property of the British Crown. The definition of "waste and unoccupied" was determined by British administrators who looked at Kikuyu land-use patterns, the system of shifting cultivation and fallow periods that had sustained the soil's fertility for centuries, and concluded that land lying fallow was land not being used, and land not being used was land available for appropriation. The logic was circular and self-serving: the Kikuyu system of land management, which was designed to preserve the soil, was interpreted as evidence that the Kikuyu were not really using the soil, which meant the British were entitled to take it.

By the 1930s, the colonial government had designated some sixteen thousand square miles of Kenya's most fertile land as the "White Highlands," reserved exclusively for European settlement. The Kikuyu, who had farmed the Central Highlands for four hundred years, were compressed into reserves that represented a fraction of their ancestral territory. The reserves were overcrowded from the start. Families that had spread across large githaka holdings were now crammed onto plots too small to sustain them. The traditional system of fallow cultivation, leaving portions of land to rest and regenerate, became impossible because there was not enough land to leave any of it idle. The soil, farmed continuously without rest, began to erode. The rivers that had run clear from the mountain slopes began to carry red silt. The forests that had covered the hillsides, forests that held the soil in place, that regulated the water cycle, that provided fuel and building material and medicinal plants, were cleared to make room for more cultivation, because there was no other option when the land was insufficient and the population was growing and the colonial government would not return what it had taken.

This was the world that produced Wangari Maathai. Not just the village of Ihithe, not just the family she was born into, not just the year 1940, but the entire structure of dispossession that had compressed the Kikuyu onto insufficient land and set in motion the cycle of deforestation, erosion, and ecological collapse that she would spend her life fighting. The environmental crisis she confronted as an adult was not a natural disaster. It was a political one. The trees were gone because the land had been stolen. The rivers were drying up because the forests that fed them had been cut down. The soil was dying because the people who lived on it had been given too little of it to farm sustainably. Every dead tree was a consequence of the Crown Lands Ordinance. Every dry riverbed was a monument to the White Highlands.

She would understand this, not immediately, not as a child, but eventually, with a clarity that would make her dangerous to people who preferred that the connection between ecological destruction and political injustice remain invisible. She would understand that you could not save the trees without confronting the system that had destroyed them, and that confronting the system meant confronting the people who ran it, and that confronting the people who ran it meant accepting that they would try to destroy you the way they had destroyed the forests: systematically, legally, and with the full apparatus of state power.

But that came later. In 1940, she was born.

Ihithe village sat in the Tetu Division of Nyeri District, in the heart of the Central Highlands, on the lower slopes of the Aberdare Range. The Aberdares, which the Kikuyu called Nyandarua, the Drying Hide, rose to the west, a wall of dark green forest that separated the highlands from the Rift Valley. To the east, Mount Kenya dominated the horizon, its twin peaks, Batian and Nelion, visible on clear mornings, snow-capped and enormous against the equatorial sky. The village itself was small, a collection of homesteads scattered across the hillsides, each family's compound consisting of several round, thatched-roof huts arranged in a pattern that reflected the Kikuyu social structure: the man's hut, the wives' huts, the granary, the cooking area, the livestock enclosure. The paths between homesteads were red earth, packed hard by generations of bare feet. The fields were planted with maize, beans, sweet potatoes, and bananas, the staples of Kikuyu agriculture. And everywhere, on the hillsides and along the streams and in the sacred groves that the elders maintained, there were trees.

Wangari Muta was born on April 1, 1940, the third of six children born to Muta Njugi and Wanjiru Kibicho. Her father was a tenant farmer. He did not own the land he worked. He was a squatter on a white settler's farm near Nakuru, in the Rift Valley, which meant that he cultivated a portion of the settler's land in exchange for his labor. This arrangement, the squatter system, was one of the pillars of the colonial agricultural economy. White settlers, who had been granted enormous tracts of the most fertile land in Kenya but who lacked the labor to work it, allowed African families to live on portions of their farms and grow food for themselves, in exchange for a specified number of days of labor per year on the settler's cash crops. The system was feudal in structure and colonial in function: the African farmer provided the labor, the white settler collected the profits, and the colonial government ensured that the arrangement persisted by maintaining the legal framework of land appropriation that made it impossible for the African farmer to acquire land of his own.

Muta Njugi worked on the farm of a settler named D. N. Neylan. She remembered her father as a skilled farmer and mechanic, a man of practical intelligence who understood the land and knew how to make it produce. Her mother, Wanjiru, was the person who shaped her most directly, a woman of the highlands, rooted in the Kikuyu agricultural traditions that had sustained the community for centuries, who taught her daughter, by example and instruction, the relationship between people and the earth they lived on.

Wangari was born in Ihithe, but the family moved to the Neylan farm at Nakuru when she was a small child, and several of her earliest years were spent there, in the Rift Valley. In 1947, when she was about seven, she returned to Ihithe with her mother and her siblings, so that her brothers could attend the village school, while her father remained behind on the settler farm. This kind of split was common in the squatter system — families divided between the settler farms where they earned their living and the reserves where their kinship networks remained intact. The child grew up in two worlds: the world of the white settler's farm, where her father worked someone else's land under someone else's authority, and the world of Ihithe, where her mother's people had lived for generations, where the forests still stood on the hillsides, and where the streams still ran clear.

It was in Ihithe that she encountered the fig tree.

The fig tree stood near a stream that ran through the family's property: a mugumo tree, a species of strangler fig that the Kikuyu considered sacred. The mugumo was one of the most important trees in the Kikuyu spiritual landscape. It was believed to be a dwelling place of Ngai, a point of contact between the human world and the divine, a place where sacrifices were made and prayers offered. The tree was never to be cut. To destroy a mugumo was to invite spiritual catastrophe, not just for the individual who wielded the axe but for the entire community. The prohibition was absolute and universally observed.

Wangari's mugumo was enormous. Its trunk was thick enough that several children could not encircle it with their arms. Its canopy spread wide over the stream, shading the water and the bank. Its roots, the massive, exposed root system that is characteristic of strangler figs, plunged into the earth near the stream and held the bank in place. The stream itself was clear and cold, fed by the mountain springs that percolated through the forest soil of the Aberdares, and it was alive with tadpoles, with freshwater crabs, with the larvae of dragonflies, with the small organisms that thrive only in clean, moving water.

Maathai would remember this tree for the rest of her life. She wrote about it in her memoir. She returned to its stream in the closing lines of her Nobel lecture. She cited it in interviews, in speeches, in the countless public appearances she made over four decades of activism. The fig tree was not a metaphor for her. It was an argument, a piece of evidence that demonstrated, in physical form, the relationship between trees and water, between forests and the survival of the communities that depended on them. The tree held the soil. The soil held the water. The water sustained the stream. The stream sustained the people and the animals and the crops. Remove the tree, and the entire system collapsed: the soil washed away, the stream dried up, the water disappeared, the community died. The chain of causation was as direct and observable as anything in nature, and a child could see it, because a child had seen it: Wangari Muta, standing by the stream in Ihithe, watching the clear water flow past the roots of the sacred fig. The lesson was all there in the water. It would take decades for it to become an argument.

She would return to Ihithe years later, after her education, after her doctorate, after her time in America, and the fig tree would be gone. Someone had cut it down. The stream had dried up. The water was gone. The bank had eroded. The soil was bare and cracked where the roots had once held it together. The frogs were gone. The tadpoles were gone. The entire ecosystem that had depended on the tree, the small, intricate web of life that had made the stream a living thing, had vanished.

She would stand where the tree had been and understand something that she had not understood as a child. The tree had not died of old age. It had not fallen in a storm. It had been cut down deliberately, by people who needed the land it stood on, or who wanted the wood it was made of, or who simply did not know what its removal would do. The destruction was a choice, a human decision that had ecological consequences the decision-maker had not anticipated and probably had not considered. The tree was gone because someone had decided it was less valuable standing than it would be as lumber or as cleared land, and that decision had killed the stream and everything that depended on it.

This was the pattern she would spend her life fighting. Not just the act of cutting down a tree, but the system of thinking that treated trees as objects to be consumed rather than as infrastructure to be maintained, the system that valued a tree's wood over its roots, its timber over its relationship to the soil and the water and the air. She would understand, eventually, that this system of thinking was not unique to the people of Ihithe who had cut down the fig tree. It was the same system that had governed the British colonial administration's approach to Kenya's forests, that governed the post-independence government's approach to Kenya's forests, that governed the Moi regime's approach to Kenya's forests. The scale was different. The logic was identical. Whether you were a subsistence farmer clearing a hillside or a president handing out forest land to political allies, you were making the same calculation: the tree was worth more dead than alive. And the calculation was wrong, catastrophically, irreversibly wrong, because the tree's value was not in its wood. Its value was in its standing. Its value was in the water it held, the soil it secured, the ecosystem it sustained, the future it made possible.

Wangari Maathai would plant trees, millions of them, to correct that calculation. She would be beaten, arrested, imprisoned, divorced, and publicly humiliated for the same purpose. She would win the Nobel Peace Prize because a committee in Oslo understood that correcting a calculation about the value of a tree was the same thing as correcting a calculation about the value of a human life, that the logic that destroys forests is the logic that destroys democracies, and that the woman who stood in front of the bulldozers to save the trees was standing in front of the same machinery that was crushing the people.

But the understanding began with the fig tree. It began in Ihithe, with a child standing by a stream, watching clear water flow past the roots of a tree that no one was allowed to cut down. What she saw there, she never stopped seeing.

The village she was born into, Ihithe in the Tetu Division, sat in the lower Aberdare foothills at an altitude of roughly 6,500 feet, in the heart of Nyeri District where the red volcanic soil organized Kikuyu life. The village was a world of round thatched huts, maize and bean gardens, banana groves, and paths worn smooth by generations of bare feet. The streams that ran from the Aberdares were cold and clear, fed by the mountain's deep forest cover, and they were the center of community life: the place where water was drawn, where women gathered, where children played. In the rainy seasons, April and October, the highlands turned an almost violent green. In the dry seasons, January and July, the grass browned but the streams persisted, sustained by the forest that held the water through the dry months. This was the world the child Wangari inherited, and it was already, by 1940, being dismantled piece by piece.

The Kenya that Wangari Muta was born into in 1940 was a colony in crisis.

The Second World War had begun seven months earlier, and Kenya, as part of the British Empire, was at war. The colony's white settlers, who numbered some twenty thousand in a country of some five million Africans, were mobilizing for the East African campaign against Italian forces in Ethiopia and Somaliland. African men were conscripted by the tens of thousands into the King's African Rifles and the military labor corps, sent to fight in Ethiopia, in Burma, in Southeast Asia, in the European theater, fighting for an empire that denied them citizenship in their own country. Over 75,000 Kenyans served in the British military during the Second World War. They returned home to find that nothing had changed: that the land was still in white hands, that the color bar was still in force, that their service to the empire had earned them nothing.

The Kikuyu population of the Central Highlands was growing, but the land available to them was not. The reserves established by the colonial government were designed for a population that no longer existed. They had been adequate, barely, for the Kikuyu population of the 1920s, but by 1940 the population had outgrown them. Families were fragmenting their holdings with each generation, dividing plots that were already too small into plots that could not sustain a family. Young men who could not find land in the reserves migrated to Nairobi, where they lived in the shantytown settlements that were growing on the outskirts of the colonial capital, Mathare Valley, Kibera, Pumwani, in conditions that the colonial government ignored and that would, within a decade, produce the Mau Mau uprising.

The forests were disappearing. The colonial administration had established a system of forest reserves, areas of indigenous forest that were ostensibly protected from clearance, but the system was designed primarily to protect the watersheds that supplied water to the white settler farms, not to preserve the forest itself. Outside the reserves, the forests were being cleared at an accelerating rate. Kikuyu farmers, compressed into insufficient reserves, cleared forestland to create more agricultural plots. White settlers, expanding their farms, cleared the forest edges of the White Highlands. The colonial administration itself cleared forest for development: for roads, for railway extensions, for the expansion of Nairobi. The forests of the Central Highlands, which had once formed a continuous belt of green from the Aberdares to Mount Kenya, were being reduced to fragments.

The consequences were already visible in 1940, though few people were paying attention. Soil erosion was increasing. The red earth of the highlands, no longer held in place by tree roots, washed into the rivers during the rainy season, silting them up, reducing their capacity, changing their flow patterns. Springs that had been reliable for generations were drying up. Streams were becoming seasonal where they had once been perennial. The firewood that women collected for cooking, the fundamental domestic fuel of rural Kenya, was becoming harder to find, requiring longer walks, more labor, more time away from the fields and the children. The cycle was self-reinforcing: fewer trees meant more erosion, which meant less productive soil, which meant more pressure to clear more trees for cultivation, which meant more erosion, which meant fewer trees. The spiral was downward, and it was accelerating.

Wangari Muta grew up inside this spiral. She did not understand it as a child. She understood it as a stream with clear water and a fig tree with enormous roots, and she understood it as her mother's labor in the fields and her mother's walks to collect firewood, and she understood it as the physical reality of a child's life in the Central Highlands in the 1940s. The understanding would come later, when she had the education to articulate what she had observed, and the authority to be taken seriously, and the stubbornness to keep saying it after everyone had told her to stop.

She was the daughter of tenant farmers in a colony that was destroying its own foundation. She was a Kikuyu girl in a society that did not educate its daughters. She was born in a year when the forests were disappearing and the rivers were dying and the soil was washing away, and no one, not the colonial government, not the Kikuyu elders, not the white settlers, not the international community, was doing anything about it.

She would do something about it. She would do it with trees: the simplest, most fundamental, most revolutionary tool available. She would plant them. She would teach other women to plant them. She would build an organization that planted them by the millions. And in the process, she would discover something that the colonial administrators and the post-independence politicians and the international development experts had never understood: that a tree is not just a tree. A tree is a political act. A tree is an assertion of sovereignty over land that someone else claims to control. A tree is a statement that this soil belongs to the people who live on it, not to the government that administers it, not to the corporation that wants to develop it, not to the political ally who has been promised it as a reward for loyalty. A tree planted by a woman who has been told she has no right to the land she stands on is the most dangerous thing in the world to a government that rules by dispossession.

The Moi government would learn this. It would learn it the hard way: in Uhuru Park, in Karura Forest, in the streets of Nairobi where Wangari Maathai stood in front of bulldozers and truncheons and tear gas and refused to move. It would learn that the woman who planted trees was more dangerous than the men who carried guns, because the guns could be confiscated and the men could be arrested, but the trees kept growing, and the women who planted them kept coming back, and the movement they had built was rooted in something deeper than any political party or military force — it was rooted in the soil itself, in the physical, undeniable fact that human beings need trees to survive, and that a government that destroys its trees is a government that is destroying its own people.

The five forested mountains of Kenya, Mount Kenya, the Aberdare Range, the Mau Complex, Mount Elgon, and the Cherangani Hills, are what hydrologists call water towers. Together they supply, by the standard estimate, some three-quarters of Kenya's renewable surface water, feed its major rivers, and generate much of the country's hydroelectric power. Every Kenyan depended on these mountains, and every Kenyan depended on the forests that clothed them. When Maathai described deforestation as a security threat, she was not speaking metaphorically. She was describing hydrology. In the two decades before 2009, the Mau Forest Complex lost roughly a quarter of its forest cover, and the Ewaso Ng'iro River, which fed the water supplies of northern Kenya, its pastoralist communities, and the wildlife reserves of the arid north, had diminished to a fraction of its historical flow. The Mara River, fed by Mau watershed flows, had declined so severely that the wildebeest migrations of the Serengeti, one of the world's great natural phenomena, drawing international tourism dollars, were threatened by insufficient water at river crossings. Environmental destruction and economic collapse, environmental destruction and political crisis: Maathai had been saying it for thirty years. The rivers proved her right.

The dictatorship fell. The trees are still growing.

It all began with the soil: with the red volcanic earth of the Central Highlands, with the sacred fig tree by the stream in Ihithe, with a child who watched clear water flow past ancient roots and remembered what she saw.