A nasty day with 2004 Nobel Peace Laureate, Wangari Mathai   by Ernest Waititu

The year was 1999. The government of Kenya under the leadership of strong man Daniel arap Moi was caught
up in a series of fraudulent deals, top among them land grabbing. In a series of these unlawful transactions,
the government opened up Karura Forest, the biggest forest that neighbors the city of Nairobi, and started
dishing out tracts of land to its cronies. The activities were a top secret but they could not escape the notice
of one woman. The woman, a professor of veterinary medicine, an environmentalist, and now the Nobel Peace
Prize laureate Wangari Maathai raised an outcry, exposing the government's plan to loot land and leave the 
country's environment in ruins.Maathai called upon all Kenyans to resist the move with the force it deserved.
Kenyans are a highly political lot, and so when Wangari – as Mathaai is fondly known on the streets and villages
of Kenya – blew the whistle, thousands of people-- many of them university students-- joined the fray. I was
then a sophomore at the university and not well initiated into the riotous tradition that characterizes student
activism in this part of the world. In this country, your youthful colleagues consider you a ‘half-baked' graduate, 
if you do not participate in at least one giant riot; some kind of ROT 101: Introduction to Rioting. On that morning
of January 8, 1999, I joined hundreds of students of my university-- Kenyatta University —as we rode to Karura
Forest.

We arrived in style: hanging precariously in commandeered lorries and tractors, whose drivers had been
intercepted along the way and forced, to contribute to the noble cause of emancipating our forests. “We shall
overcome…we shall overcome,” we sung. In the forest, we found other patriotic Kenyans ready to put their lives
in the firing line for the sake of liberating our beleaguered forests. Unmistakably, here was Maathai, 59—old
enough to be a grandmother to many of us-- but ready to lead us into the heavily guarded forest. The Kenyan
government at the time was overly meticulous when it came to guarding its interests.It had mobilized hundreds
of law enforcement officers, usually known as the General Service Unit, to surround the gates of the forest.

On reaching the forest gate, we, led by Maathai, tried to force ourselves in. Then, hell broke loose as the police
descended on us with teargas canisters and batons. We ran; every man and woman for himself or herself, the
cops in hot pursuit. You could hear a cry of agony here and another there as the police labored to give us a
taste of what we had asked for. Not even the Nobel Peace Laurate was spared. While I arrived back to campus
with only a few bruises on my body, a happy-go-lucky youth who had participated in the protest not because of
having a philosophy but perhaps as an outlet to my youthful energy, Maathai and her close colleagues--
advanced of age and definitely challenged in speed-- bore the blunt edge of our actions. The police clobbered
them senseless; they had to be admitted to hospital.

The next day, I watched Maathai on television in her hospital bed as she vowed to return later to fulfill her mission “if it meant dying, fighting to prevent the irregular allocation of the land.” And sure enough, as the sun rises in the east, she returned to the forest two months later, in March, leading opposition members of the parliament, to resist the land grabbing. Her efforts would bear fruits later when the government stopped the illegal exercise. Her dreams would become a reality when Kenyans voted the Moi regime out of power in 2002. In her struggle against the autocratic regime, she had led other tough fights against corruption and against detention against trial, activities which once led to her own detention. Now an assistant minister in environment in the government, Mathai is doing what her heart has always yearned for:painting Kenya green with her tree-planting and environmental conservation activities.

When the Nobel prize committee awarded her the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday Oct. 8th, making her the first African woman and only the sixth African to win the prize, my mind flashed back to that Friday morning of 1999, when she was beaten and bloodied for the love of her country, and I told myself that was a prize well-deserved.