TAKING ROOT REVEALING REFRESHING RADICALISM OF
WANGARI
By Margaretta
wa Gacheru
Wangari
Maathai was alive, well and already destined for immortality before she helped
Lisa Merton and Alan Daker make her autobiographical documentary film, Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai in
2008.
She had
already made history and broken so many records for women’s achievements that
her name was world renowned. She didn’t need a movie to make her famous!
She had been the first female
doctorate from East Africa, the founder of the award-winning Greenbelt Movement
which had inspired tree planting among rural women and men not just in Kenya but
throughout Africa and the rest of the world. And she was the first African
woman to ever receive the Nobel Prize for Peace.
So having a film made about her life
was not anything unusual for a woman who had rubbed shoulders with monarchs and
prime ministers as well as with rural peasants and hard hitting pressmen and
MPs.
Yet we can be so grateful to Merton
and Dater for taking on the project of making Wangari’s movie because who could
have foreseen that she would leave us while she was still in her prime. She was
71 when she died, the chemotherapy she’d endured for many months having failed
to heal her of the ovarian cancer that ate away at her inner parts.
But 71 was 71 years young for this
woman who had been born into a Kenya that was yet to become polluted with toxic
fumes and processed foods filled with carcinogenic chemicals. Wangari’s healthy
early upbringing and education feature significantly in Taking Root, revealing a good deal about how this great woman came
to become who she did.
The stark contrast between what she
experienced as a child in Nyeri and what she found upon her return from
scholarly studies in the United States (having been one of the few women who
were part of the historic Airlift of Kenyan students to the US in 1960) is one
of the things that inspired her to take up the monumental challenge of
reforesting her homeland by starting the Greenbelt Movement.
The film brings out the way she
remained grounded and humble while working closely with rural women, first as
the
Chair of the
National Council of Women of Kenya, then as the founder mother of the Greenbelt
Movement. But it also shows how she was bound to become a ‘freedom fighter’ and
human rights advocate, having grown up in the space where the founder of the
‘Mau Mau’ Land and Freedom Army, Dedan Kimathi had also come from.
Wangari’s
radicalism is rarely emphasized when we refer to her as a former university
lecturer, Member of Parliament, Assistant Minister and Nobel Laureate. But Taking Root reveals this side of her,
the side that fought the former Kenya President Daniel arap Moi and saved Uhuru
Park, Kenya’s correlative to New York City’s Central Park, for posterity. It’s
also the side that stood with the mothers of political detainees at the tipping
point when Moi realized he had to relent and open up the government to
multiparty democracy, the mothers’ and Wangari’s influence having proved to be
too powerful even for him.
Taking Root allows Wangari to tell her own
story. But it also lets others who were close to her through the years give eye
witness accounts of this great women’s influence on their lives and the lives
men and women all over the world.
Whether you
knew Wangari well or not, you will come away from Taking Root knowing she still lives in all the seeds she helped to
plant both in Mother Earth and in a myriad of individuals’ lives.
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