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According to Muthuki Janet, when Wangari founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, GBM, she also abandoned her academic career that looked so promising for her (Janet 5). Wangari gave up any future she could have had with the university to do her mission, which was the Green Belt Movement. According to Keturah Scott, it was difficult for Wangari and the GBM when they first started planting the trees and making tree nurseries. Not everything always worked and some things had to be adjusted.
It was a work in progress and not everything was going to work, especially since this was a new thing they had just started doing. They had to learn as they went. This attitude contributed to the Green Belt Movement being successful (Scott 3).
As the Green Belt Movement continued to grow, so did the problems that Wangari, unknowingly, had with her husband, Mwangi Mathai. According to Alnoor Amlani, Mwangi considered Wangari to be “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control” (Amlani 4).
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This attitude of Mwangi’s led to him getting divorced from Wangari and leaving her to care for their 3 children. In her memoir, Maathai explains that Mwangi viewed her as society viewed her, which was that the man of the house was suppose to be in control not their wife. This was a problem for Mwangi and he could not deal with it so he left and later divorced her. He even would not let her keep using his last name after she did not even want it in the first place, so she ended up just adding an extra A.
Her husband leaving her did not stop her mission though. She kept pushing forward and worked even harder on the Green Belt Movement.
As time went on the Green Belt Movement spread throughout Kenya. According to Keturah Scott, when other groups heard about the Green Belt Movement, they were eager to start helping. As more and more groups and people wanted to plant trees, a problem arose: Where were they going to get all the seed? The Green Belt Movement had been the ones to give the seed at first, but this became a problem because it made the woman dependent on them for seeds. To solve this, they told the woman to go and try to find their own seed to plant by looking in the forests. The Green Belt Movement continued to grow more and more so much so that it started to attract national and international attention (Scott 4). The Green Belt Movement continued to grow more and more as time went on, but soon it became more than just about trees. As Wangari describes in her memoir, “the Green Belt Movement grew from a tree-planting program into one that planted ideas as well” (Maathai 173). The Green Belt Movement evolved and changed into something more that Maathai had probably originally anticipated.
As time went on, Wangari became more passionate about protecting the environment. According to Franck Prévot, this did not sit well with the government, since they were making their money off cutting down the tree. They tried to stop her, but she would not be quiet and stood her ground (Prévot 24). According to Alnoor Amlani, when the former president of Kenya, President Daniel arap Moi, and Robert Maxwell wanted to tear down a part of Nairobi’s Uhuru Park to build a 62-story building that they would call Times Towers. This infuriated a lot of people, especially Maathai. She campaigned against its construction while using logic to support her claim. She would not stop until the project was abandoned. This obviously did not go over well with the authorities, who now saw her as a threat. She ended up having to leave Kenya for a short time with her children when she got death threats. She came back with more fight and fire in her heart. (Amlani 5).
The Green Belt Movement. (2022, Apr 02). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/the-green-belt-movement-2-essay
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