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Preface

Literature available on Professor Wangari Muta Maathai primarily focuses on her work with the Green Belt Movement and the 2004 conferment of the Nobel Peace Prize. In most accounts, the scholar and critical thinker are lost in celebrations of the activist, and the activist is very narrowly feted. This book focuses on Maathai’s thoughts, words, and works, locating them in the global map of knowledge production, an exercise necessary to the project of centering African thinkers in the academy and in scholarship in general.¹ With a larger-than-life profile like Maathai’s, it is easy for the person and public history to overshadow engagement with the ideas. For this reason, I invite readers to privilege, in their encounter with this text, the analysis, philosophies, and theories presented.

The philosophical and theoretical legacies of Maathai’s at times controversy-inspiring life and work have not, until now, been examined in a book-length monograph. Engaging her as a scholar-activist, this interdisciplinary undertaking goes beyond the simple recording of herstory to tease out her world senses and critical thinking on four main subjects: women’s empowerment and liberation, environmentalism, democratic spaces, and globalization and global governance. Writing this book involved years of mining and reviewing publications, speeches, interviews, and news reports by and on Maathai and identifying recurring subjects. I consolidated and analyzed the material, and for each topical area I isolated clusters of themes, which provided directions for framing solid concepts. In order to articulate and engage them, it was necessary to christen some concepts, philosophies, and theories. I endeavored to maintain the integrity of Maathai’s thoughts and words in the processes of functionalizing and naming these ideas and locating them in dialogue with each other.

The book is quote-heavy to authentically represent Maathai’s ideas and allow the reader access to not just the meaning but also the spirit of her words and voice. Through this direct encounter with her words, readers may trace the development of Maathai’s thoughts and identify fresh associations, concepts, contexts, and frameworks to further the work this book begins. My purpose is to present her ideas and ideals in a way that scholars, activists, and policymakers can study, apply, test, question, critique, or even challenge in their own work. It is not my intent to register Maathai as the absolute originator of all the thoughts isolated during this sojourn into her world. Rather, I outline how the application of her unique lens prompts new practical and epistemological implications for those ideas. Emerging from this exertion a principal philosophy and lens through which I conceive the arguments of the book and which I name “radical utu.”

Exploring Maathai’s world and world senses, I delineate radical utu as a driving idea and ideal. In a nod to her promotion of indigenous African ways of knowing and languages (Maathai 1995a, 2009b), I use the Swahili word utu to reference what Maathai signified as “what it means to be human.” This orients radical living as both a philosophy and an active process—individuals and communities (re) imagining themselves as engaged in relations and encounters with other humans rooted in ethics and values of equity and honor for the humanity of others and for their environments.

Actuating utu is an exercise in expediting humanness and humanity. Utu, under different appellations, is a philosophy and principle that undergirds the community organization of many indigenous African societies. Utu is the Swahili word for ubuntu. That concept is a reality in many African cultures and languages, even in non-Bantu areas—for example, nitey among the Wolof in Senegal and The Gambia. The Bantu word has phonological variants across communities, including bumonto in Kichiga/Kiganda (Uganda), bumuntu in Kisukuma and Kihaya (Tanzania), vumuntu in Shitsonga and Shitswa (Mozambique), bomoto in Bobangi (Democratic Republic of Congo), ubumuntu in Kinyarwanda, and gimuntu in Gikongo and Gikwese (DRC, Angola). The term utu is appropriate for this application because it typifies multiple significations. Utu allows us to mediate that colossal inquiry proffered by Maathai—what it means to be human (Maathai 2010a, 16–17)—from a number of perspectives. The noun for “person” in the Swahili language is mtu. Utu therefore, first and foremost, simply indicates the reality of being a person as opposed to another entity. This designation of utu has as its closest English equivalent the phrase “being a human being.” Utu denotes personhood. Utu may also be used to identify one’s unique personality that is grounded by the fact that one has personhood—a performance of personhood, so to speak. Another interpretation of utu is “humanness”—the capacity to “do” being human through exhibiting what would be considered human qualities such as conscience, ethics, emotion, considerate sense, and spirituality. These makings of utu, signifying desirable human nature, are supposed to set human beings apart from other occupiers of our universe (17). As Maathai noted, “They define our humanity” (16). Utu, therefore, also speaks to the common essentiality of humans. She elaborated on the universality of this character of utu, saying, “These values are not contained only within certain religions, neither does one have to profess a faith in a divine being to live by them. However, they do seem to be a part of human nature, and I’m convinced that we are better people because we hold them, and that humankind is better off with them, than without them” (16).

Four chapters of this book, analyzing the identified topical areas through the lens of radical utu, are sandwiched between two chapters that locate Maathai in history. There is a rationale behind this organization. Chapter 1 offers an introduction to cleanse the previously identified limited characterization of Wangari Muta Maathai in the minds of some readers before they engage with her ideas. The chapter also familiarizes those who have not yet encountered Maathai with her life and works. Unlike the rest of the chapters, which combine critical analysis and narrative forms, this chapter employs a predominantly narrative voice to meet the second goal of its inclusion—allowing readers to encounter the person in order to appreciate the making of the critical thinker. Because she did not see the different facets of her life, scholarship, and activism as independent from each other, I present her different roles, practices, and identities as additive, constituting the aggregative creation of the person in history: family member and scholar and public leader and activist and politician.

In the final chapter, I raise the question of legacy and examine the extent to which Maathai’s ideas and ideals have been preserved or propagated in scholarship and activism. Within that investigation, Maathai’s narrative provides a platform that allows me to engage the subject of the historical erasure of critical African thinkers in scholarship, the academy, and beyond. It is my hope that this presentation of Maathai as a thought influencer advances the goals of initiatives responding to this urgent challenge.