ABSTRACT
In 1895, the British Empire established the East Africa Protectorate, which became the Kenya Colony in 1920. Only about 20 percent of Kenya is arable for farming, most of this land is in the highlands, and the rest of Kenya is suitable mainly for rotating grazing. Agricultural and pastoralist tribes developed in these respective
areas. British colonists appropriated the highlands for themselves, displacing primarily the Kikuyu ethnic group, setting up the conditions for the Mau Mau rebellion in the 1950s and 1960s. Kenya gained independence in 1963 and organized into a nation-state where Kikuyu ethnic leader Jomo Kenyatta and then Daniel arap Moi, both of the Kenyan African National Union (KANU) party, ruled Kenya with repressive tactics and silenced dissent for more than 40 years. Throughout, pre-colonial, colonial, and independent Kenyan
society, women did not have sufficient access to critical resources. Property was inherited primarily through the male line and women only had use-rights to land, despite the fact that they have been and continue to be the primary tillers of soil and responsible for feeding the household. In some ethnic groups, women were not even considered adults. These rules were strengthened through religion, education, and codified in the legal system, and many of these problems persist today. To cope with these repressive conditions, Kenyan women have a
tradition of forming women’s work groups who share labor, for example when another woman is sick, has given birth or is dealing with other subsistence challenges. For example, when the British institutionalized forced labor alongside poll taxes, men migrated out looking for wage work, “destroying the local culture and economy and institutionalizing colonial structures and ideology” (Oduol and Kabira, 1995). From the start, the Empire’s rules were meant to place Kenyan natural resources and labor into the global imperial market. For example, in 1955, the Empire made rules to put land to use for large-scale cash crops that displaced subsistence work, culture, and food sovereignty for Kenyans and resulted in “extensive overcultivation, overgrazing, and soil erosion” (Ibid). Colonial forces expected women to then add conservation to their workload, and consequently women organized open rebellion and riots, as well as other resistance efforts both during and after independence. However, some women work groups took up planting trees for their own reasons. The National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK) was one
such group, working on improving the daily conditions for women. In 1977, Dr Wangari Maathai (1940-2011) founded what has come to be called the Green Belt Movement (GBM) and
became the leader of the NCWK in 1980. The GBM responded to Kenyan women who “reported that their streams were drying up, their food supply was less secure, and they had to walk further and further to get firewood for fuel and fencing. GBM encouraged the women to work together to grow seedlings and plant trees to bind the soil, store rainwater, provide food and firewood, and receive a small monetary token for their work” (The Green Belt Movement, 2013). But, they did not stop there, they also organized and investigated why they were marginalized in their own society, fought agricultural incursions and land grabs, and worked to change the position of women and development, across the region (Oduol and Kabira, 1995). Maathai used her position to confront gender discrimination
from the Moi regime and the KANU party. In opposition to the Moi regime, Maathai was assaulted sometimes to the point of being beaten unconscious. She was also imprisoned, publicly ridiculed, and declared an enemy of the state (Hayanga, 2006). Originally, the GBM was started to help provide women with
what they needed most, but which had been degraded-food, water, fuel, and fodder-and the GBM knew that trees were the avenue for protecting these critical life supports. Trees keep the soil from eroding, protect watersheds, and provide important fuel for poor subsistence families, but during the colonial period and after, deforestation had been initiated in order to grow cash crops, especially coffee, for the Empire and food crops for a growing population. Maathai recounts:
Maathai and the thousands of women who would join her, as of 2012, have planted over 50 million trees to protect their own wellbeing and the wellbeing of their households, and later in the movement, to protect the wellbeing of an international population-all initially in the face of a repressive state, a male-dominated society, and a daunting neo-colonial environment that was being dismembered in front of them driven by the enormous power of overseas markets. In 2002, the authoritarian Moi regime ended along with the
reign of KANU, and Maathai was brought into the government and served in the parliament and as Minister of Environment and Natural Resources. Most importantly, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her work in bringing the issues of sustainable development to the level of peace-building. Here is an excerpt of her Nobel speech available at the Nobel website:
What can we do to avoid failing the sustainability test? Unfortunately, there are no clear universally applicable ways to govern because each ecological space and political group has their own needs and histories. However, we know a few guiding principles. First, governments and powerful actors, like corporations, cannot
simply declare or promise to be sustainable, while still pursuing uninterrogated, uninterrupted, and unbalanced economic growth at the expense of dynamic, self-organizing ecological systems that take thousands of years to form. If we are not living with the boundaries of the Earth’s limits now, simply rebranding policies or corporations to sound more green without actually changing the direction of consumption is not sustainable, yet this empty promise is evident in so many government ministries and in nearly every aisle of our stores (Smith and Farley, 2014). Corporate green washing (promising environmental sustainable practices without substance) and government policies that do not reflect the problem structure of sustainability risk the severities of Normative Failure because they do not address real problems, and they disarm the public to think that these problems are really being taken seriously. Institutions at every scale, from the local to the global, will be
forced to govern trade-offs and negotiate the central fault lines of sustainability. No single value of the three “Es” can dominate all the others without creating harsh imbalances that are not sustainable; and, governing systems must be adaptive. This is governance consistent with the Adaptive Cycle and Panarchy.
