ABSTRACT
Women’s empowerment, women’s education, and women’s equality: everyone agrees that these
are all good things and worthy goals. But what exactly do these things mean? And what do they
mean in an East African context? What forms of empowerment, education, and equality are truly
liberating and what forms are deceptive, seeming to offer liberation while in reality serving to tie
women down in some new and subtle way? The purpose of this paper is to explore these issues
from the perspective of a remarkable East African woman, Wangari Maathai. For too long, we in
the West have approached issues of empowerment, education, and equality from our own per-
spective only, as if we were the only ones in the world who truly knew what these words meant.
But even a cursory glance at our own societies, rife as they are with problems and injustices of all
kinds, should give the lie to such presumption. In our dialog with our third world neighbors, it is
we who have the most to learn.
