Roots of Resistance: Honouring Wangari Maathai, the Mother of African Ecofeminism

 

In the heart of Kenya’s highlands, where the soil is rich and the trees once stood like sentinels of life, a woman planted trees and a quiet revolution.

Wangari Maathai, the fierce and compassionate founder of the Green Belt Movement, was more than an environmentalist. She was a warrior for justice, a mother of trees, and the matriarch of African ecofeminism. Her life was interwoven with themes of resistance, renewal, and radical love for the Earth and its people, especially its women.

At Ecofem Tales, we remember Maathai not just as the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, but as a profound embodiment of what it means to stand at the intersection of ecological protection and gender liberation. Her story is not a relic of the past, it is a living call to environmental action.

In the 1970s, Kenya was facing rampant deforestation, soil erosion, and a decline in water levels. All of these were consequences of colonial land mismanagement and post-independence development models that saw nature as a commodity, not a community.

Women, especially rural women, were the first to feel the bite of environmental degradation. They had to walk longer distances for firewood, their crops suffered, and their families hungered. Maathai, a biologist with a PhD and a pulse that felt the pain of her people, listened.

She responded with policy papers for justice and seedlings to heal the earth.

The Green Belt Movement, launched in 1977 and empowered women to plant trees as a way to restore the land and their livelihoods. It was grassroots in the truest sense: community-led, eco-centered, and deeply feminist. Over 51 million trees were eventually planted under Wangari Maathai’s leadership.

Maathai's work was revolutionary because it named and challenged the system that connected environmental destruction to patriarchy, authoritarianism, and neocolonial exploitation. Her ecofeminism was not imported from the West, it grew organically from African struggles.

She understood that environmental degradation and women’s oppression were two sides of the same coin. Both relied on domination, extraction, and silencing. In resisting them, Maathai did not separate nature from justice, she made them inseparable.

In this advocacy, she paid the price. She was beaten, arrested, vilified, and politically sidelined. Yet she stood firm, a towering baobab of resistance, saying:

“It is the little things citizens do. That’s what will make the difference. My little thing is planting trees.”

Her "little thing" became a movement that inspired generations, from the highlands of Kenya to the halls of the United Nations.

As we face today’s climate crisis, one that disproportionately affects the Global South, Indigenous communities, and women, we urgently need Wangari Maathai’s legacy. Not just her methods, but her mindset.

She taught us:

• That healing the Earth is a just act.
• That local knowledge matters as much as global science.
• That women are not victims of climate change; they are frontline defenders.
• That trees are not just carbon sinks, but symbols of resistance, memory, and rebirth.

Wangari Maathai passed in 2011, but her roots remain strong and deep. Every sapling planted by a rural woman, every protest against land grabbing, every girl who learns she can both lead and nurture these are the fruits of her labour.

At Ecofem Tales, we carry her story forward because we believe stories change the world. And Wangari’s story is not just worth remembering, it is worth repeating, retelling, and replanting.

So, what is your “little thing”?

Maybe it’s reducing plastic. Maybe it’s teaching others. Maybe it's joining a land restoration project. Whatever it is, know that Maathai believed in the power of “little things” to grow forests of change.

Let us tend to them, with care, courage, and the ecofeminist fire that Wangari Maathai lit for us all.

Viva Wangari Maathai. Viva ecofeminism.