Wangari Maathai chosen to speak at Commencement

On April 26, 2002, Wangari Maathai spoke at CC about the Green Belt Movement and women's rights.

The first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize will speak at Connecticut College’s 88th Commencement ceremony on May 21, 2006.

Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan veterinary science professor and environmentalist, is internationally recognized for her persistent struggle for democracy, human rights and environmental conservation. She is the founder of the grassroots Green Belt Movement, created in 1977 to curtail the effects of deforestation and desertification in Kenya. Today, more than 30 million trees have been planted across Kenya, and similar initiatives have been successfully launched in Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Lesotho, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. The movement has gone on to campaign for education, nutrition and other issues important to women.

Maathai won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004, and was praised by the committee for taking “a holistic approach to sustainable development that embraces democracy, human rights and women’s rights in particular.” In addition to being the first African woman to win the prize, she is also the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctoral degree, and the first woman in Kenya to hold an associate professorship and chair an academic department.

The Fuller-Maathai Professorship in Gender and Women’s Studies (GWS) at Connecticut College was established in 1997 by alumna Cynthia Davis ’66. A committee of faculty, students and alumni voted to name the new professorship in honor of both Maathai and Margaret Fuller, a prominent 19th-century social and political thinker.

The professorship currently is held by Mab Segrest, who joined the CC faculty in 2002. “Maathai’s life and work have shown us that injustices and imbalances in human systems help create conditions for environmental disasters,” she said. “It is a lesson that we in the United States are learning more thoroughly in the wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, even as Central America suffers from floods, earthquakes and mudslides and South Asia from a mammoth quake.”

Segrest said she’s happy for the Class of 2006 — that graduates will have the words and thoughts of a Nobel laureate at this key juncture in their lives.

In 2002, GWS and the Goodwin-Niering Center for Conservation Biology and Environmental Studies sponsored Maathai to lecture at CC about the Green Belt Movement and women’s rights.

Later that year Maathai was elected to Kenya’s parliament with 98 percent of the vote, and was subsequently appointed as assistant minister for environment, natural resources and wildlife in Kenya’s parliament.

Maathai, known as “The Tree Woman” in Kenya, lives in Nairobi.