📍Nyeri, Nyeri County, Central Kenya 10100
1940 – 2011“I was born in 1940 in Nyeri in the central highlands of Kenya, the daughter of a Kikuyu farmer. I grew up near a fig tree by a stream that the community considered sacred — the roots held the soil, the tree provided food and shade, the stream ran clear. When I returned to Nyeri as an adult I found the stream dry and the trees gone and the land eroding. I founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, which paid rural women a small stipend to plant trees. By the time I received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, the movement had planted forty-five million trees across Africa. The fig tree of my childhood, the dry stream, the eroded hillside — these were not abstract environmental concerns but the specific destruction of a specific place that I had loved.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📷 Location image · via Wikimedia Commons
Sources: Maathai, W. Unbowed: A Memoir (2006), Knopf; Maathai, W. The Challenge for Africa (2009), Pantheon