Friday, 30 September 2011 13:09

Written by ghanapolitics.net

On 1 April 1940, Maathai was born in the village of Ihithe, Nyeri District, in the central highlands of the colony of Kenya, then part of the British Empire.^[1] Her family were Kikuyu, the most populous ethnic group in Kenya, and had lived in the area for several generations.^[2] Around 1943, Maathai's family relocated to a white-owned farm in the Rift Valley, near the town of Nakuru, where her father had found work.^[3] Late in 1947, she returned to Ihithe with her mother, as two of her brothers were attending primary school in the village, and there was no schooling available on the farm where her father worked. Her father remained at the farm.^[4] Shortly afterward, at the age of eight, she joined her brothers at Ihithe Primary School.^[5]

At the age of eleven, Maathai moved to St. Cecilia's Intermediate Primary School, a boarding school at the Mathari Catholic Mission in Nyeri.^[6] Maathai studied at St. Cecilia's for four years. During this time, she became fluent in English and converted to Catholicism, taking the Christian name Mary Josephine. She also was involved with the Christian society known as the Legion of Mary, whose members attempted "to serve God by serving fellow human beings."^[7] Studying at St. Cecilia's, Maathai was sheltered from the ongoing Mau Mau Uprising, which forced her mother to move from their homestead to an emergency village in Ihithe.^[8] When she completed her studies there in 1956 she was rated first in her class, and was granted admission to the only Catholic high school for girls in Kenya, Loreto High School Limuru in Limuru.^[9]

Friday, 30 September 2011 13:09

Written by ghanapolitics.net

Maathai received a scholarship to study at Mount St. Scholastica College (now Benedictine College), in Atchison, Kansas. At Mount St. Scholastica, she majored in biology, with minors in chemistry and German.^[11] After receiving her bachelor of science degree in 1964, she was accepted to the University of Pittsburgh to study for a master's degree in biology. Her graduate studies there were funded by the Africa-America Institute,^[12] and during her time in Pittsburgh, she first experienced environmental restoration, as local environmentalists pushed to rid the city of air pollution.^[13] In January 1966, Maathai was awarded her Master of Science in Biological Sciences,^[14] and was appointed to a position as research assistant to a professor of zoology at University College of Nairobi.^[15]

Upon her return to Kenya, Maathai dropped her Christian name, preferring to be known by her birth name, Wangari Muta.^[16] When she arrived at the university to start her new job, she was informed that it had been given to someone else. Maathai believed this was because of gender and tribal bias.^[17] After a job search lasting two months, Professor Reinhold Hofmann, from the University of Giessen in Germany, offered her a job as a research assistant in the microanatomy section of the newly established Department of Veterinary Anatomy in the School of Veterinary Medicine at University College of Nairobi.^[18]

In April 1966, she met Mwangi Mathai, another Kenyan who had studied in America, who would later become her husband.^[19] She also rented a small shop in the city, and established a general store, at which her sisters worked. In 1967, at the urging of Professor Hofmann, she traveled to the University of Giessen in Germany in pursuit of a doctorate. She studied both at Giessen and the University of Munich.