“I will be a hummingbird’ | Wangari Maathai

Kenyan environmentalist and 2004 Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai died late Sunday from cancer. At 71, Mrs Maathai was one of the most widely respected women in Africa, wearing many hats as an environmentalist, feminist, politician, rabble-rouser, human rights advocate and head of the Green Belt Movement.

Wangari Maathai was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize

Born into a progressive-thinking family near Nyeri, in the Central Highlands of Kenya, Wangari Maathal attended Loreto Girls’ High School in 1959, at a time when the majority of girls in Kenya were not educated. Her elder brother Nderitu insisted that she become an exception.

Upon graduation, the young woman became part of the “Kennedy airlift,” a scholarship program of the U.S. government and the Kennedy family that took her to Mount St. Scholastica (now Benedictine College) in Atchison, Kansas, where she completed a bachelor’s degree in biological sciences. writes Green Belt

In 1966 she earned a master’s degree at the University of Pittsburgh. That year she returned to a newly independent Kenya, and soon after joined the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Nairobi. In 1971 she received a Ph.D., the first woman in east and central Africa to do so. She became the first woman to chair a department at the University and the first to be appointed a professor.

Professor Maathai’s work on behalf of the environment and the poor began by paying poor women a few shilling to plant trees. Her determined views on behalf of the unprivileged made her a thorn in the side of Kenya’s powerful men for decades.