Do these names sound at all familiar? They should, as each print in the Genius series is named after an iconic person in history, mainly focused on math, science, and literature. When I started really getting into these diapers and learned the backstories to each diaper, I was even more intrigued and sought more information on each one. Little did I know just how much I would take away.
Learning about these diapers makes me even more proud to own them, as they each have their own story. :)
I'll be posting a diaper a day, so be sure to check back for history on the other diapers in this series!
Inspiration: Wangari Maathai
Contribution: Environmental and Women’s Rights Activism
Birth: 01 April 1940 - Nyeri, Kenya
Death: 25 September 2011 - Nairobi, Kenya
Wangari Maathai was a Kenyan political and environmental activist and her country's assistant minister of environment, natural resources and wildlife.
Environmental activist Wangari Muta Maathai grew up in a small village in Nyeri, Kenya, the daughter of a tenant farmer. Maathai’s family decided to send her to school, which was uncommon for girls at that time, and she started a local primary school when she was 8.
She was an excellent student, able to continue her education at the Loreto Girls’ High School and Mount St. Scholastica College in the United States on scholarship, where she earned her bachelor’s degree in Biology in 1964. She completed a master’s degree in Biological Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh two years later, and returned to Kenya to study veterinary anatomy at the University of Nairobi.
In 1971, Maathai made history as the first woman in East Africa to earn a doctorate degree, and she joined the university’s faculty as the first woman to chair a university department in the region in 1976.
Maathai is best known for the Green Belt Movement, established in 1977 to end the devastation of Kenya’s forests and lands caused by development and remedy the negative impact that this development had on the country’s environment. It also served to help the nation’s women: “Women needed income and they needed resources because theirs was being depleted,” Maathai explained to People magazine. “So we decided to solve both problems together.”
The movement was very successful, being responsible for the planting of more than 30 million trees in Kenya and providing around 30,000 women with new skills and opportunities. Maathai also challenged the government on its development plans and its handling of the country’s land, turning what was an environmental movement into a political one as well.
Due to her outspoken criticism of dictator Daniel arap Moi, Maathai was beaten and arrested numerous times. The most famous of her actions was in 1989, when she and her organization staged a protest in Nairobi’s Uhuru Park to prevent the construction of a skyscraper. The project was eventually dropped as the campaign drew national attention, and the place in the park where they demonstrated is now known as “Freedom Corner”.
Ironically, Maathai was beaten and badly injured at the same place a year later, during a call for the release of political prisoners. “Nobody would have bothered me if all I did was to encourage women to plant trees,” she later said. “But I started seeing the linkages between the problems that we were dealing with and the root causes of environmental degradation. And one of those root causes was misgovernance.”
Maathai remained a vocal opponent of the Kenyan government until Moi’s political party lost control in 2002, when she finally earned a seat in the country’s parliament. She soon was appointed assistant minister of environment, natural resources, and wildlife, and received the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy, and peace”.
In her Nobel speech, Maathai said that picking her for the renowned peace prize “challenged the world to broaden the understanding of peace: There can be no peace without equitable development, and there can be no development without sustainable management of the environment in a democratic and peaceful space.”
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