Frida Kahlo spent most of her 47 years sick and confined to her bed, but that
didn’t stop her from having torrid erotic affairs with both men and women. She was an intense, passionate, fiercely intelligent woman with a formidable unibrow. She wanted to be a doctor but fate intervened, and she became an artist, literally by accident.
read Frida’s story at Fascinating Queers at Out Impact
Wangari Maathai is known around the world as “the tree lady.” The Kenyan superwoman was considered a dissident back when she founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, and jailed for the heinous crimes of tree planting and providing jobs that could help stave off soil erosion in Kenya. Born in 1940, and married in 1969, her husband divorced her because she was too outspoken and he could not control her. The judge agreed, and Maathai was thrown in prison again for sassing him. It was a place she would visit frequently, for speaking out against dictatorship, political corruption, and tribal politics. Now she works from within the government, and is a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
Maathai is known as much for her spectacular presence as for her awards, her trees, and her controversies. Corpulent and broad-faced, incredibly vivacious, with a megawatt smile, she is surely an incarnation of the earth goddesses, and indeed, she is called Tree Mother of Africa. She wears traditional Kenyan outfits, or dresses inspired by tradition, including head wraps, in bold colours. Her beauty and tribute to her native styles are but a tiny sliver of this brainiac goddess’s power. Fearless and astoundingly intelligent, she left Africa as a young girl in the early ‘60s to study biology at an American Catholic school for which she had won a scholarship. She picked up a Masters degree before returning to Nairobi, Kenya to become East Africa’s first lady PhD. By 1971, she was a professor of veterinary medicine at the University of Nairobi, and the dean of her faculty.
Wangari Maathai lets nothing stand in her way. Clearly, she is not affected by the laws of nature, gender, or customs, and certainly not by the fact that a day has only 24 hours. Her daytimer may be a lengthier database than the New York phone book. Even a brief run-down of a very few selected projects that Wangari has been involved in would rattle Wonder Woman. She founded the Green Belt grassroots movement in 1977, planting over 40 million trees. Later, the Pan African Green Belt was formed, with countries like Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Lesotho, Ethiopia, and Zimbabwe beginning similar planting initiatives. Wangari sat as chairperson on the National Council of Women of Kenya. She was co-chair of Jubilee 2000 Africa Campaign, seeking cancellation solutions for unpayable debts for Africa’s poorest countries. She saved Uhuru Park, some say single-handedly, from bulldozing by the President Moi regime.
The list goes on and on and on.
She serves on endless boards, including but not limited to the commission for Global Governance and Commission on the Future, UN Secretary General’s Advisory Board on Disarmament, The Jane Goodall Institute, Women and Environment Development Organization (WEDO), World Learning for International Development, Green Cross International, Environment Liaison Center International, and the Worldwide Network of Women in Environmental Work.
She was a vocal supporter of International Year of Deserts and Desertification, a flag-bearer at the 2006 Olympics, and she spearheaded the United Nations Billion Tree Campaign. She worked with the Congo Forest Basin Fund, an international effort to preserve Africa’s largest tropical rain forest, securing a massive donation (100 million) from Britain.
She hosted the Global Young Greens in Nairobi in 2007, a conference for international youth about environmental and social justice. And she helped launch the Nobel Women’s Initiative in 2006. And she established Peace Tent, an initiative to foster goodwill among warring African tribes. And she has stripped naked in the streets of Nairobi with other women to protest torture and corruption.
She has honorary degrees from half a dozen universities. Her awards include he Hunger Project’s Africa Prize for Leadership, Woman of the World 1989, the Petra Kelly Prize for Environment, The Conservation Scientist Award, and of course, she was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize (2004).
Oh, yeah, and she also ran for President in 1997. For unclear reasons, her party withdrew her candidacy. In 2002, she was elected to parliament with 98 per cent of the vote! The president then appointed her Assistant Minister for Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife in Kenya’s ninth parliament.
While her work for peace and for ecology has generally been above reproach, her ideas on AIDS in Africa have generated considerable controversy. She is allegedly a proponent of the idea that AIDS was created in a laboratory as a biological weapon of mass destruction. This viewpoint caused the United States some alarm, as the lab she was pointing at would seemingly be the United States, with racist motivations. There is also the concern that common diseases resulting from malnutrition, poverty, pollution, and infectious water supplies are overwhelmingly classed as AIDS, often treated with toxic antiretroviral drugs. No doubt these drugs save some lives, but there is also no doubt that clean water and fresh meat and vegetables would go way further in supporting health measures.
While Wangari’s viewpoints on an issue as explosive as AIDS may be met with reactionary emotions, it would be reasonable to consider what a woman of her extraordinary education in biology and her experience in African history and culture has to say. American groups like HEAL which question the HIV-AIDS hypothesis and give considerable evidence toward alternate theories of treatment are muzzled by the government and by gay communities and the medical establishment. Yet in truth no one knows anything about AIDS, and in fact HIV tests are completely unreliable in both results, medications work erratically, and many AIDS patients die without any sign of the HIV virus! Not knowing the answers myself, I am willing to consider the possibilities, and if the white world has nothing to hide, it has nothing to hide.
Despite the hysteria over Maathai’s expression of the possible origin of the AIDS mystery, she has been integral in educating her people away from some destructive primitive mythologies. Some tribes were certain that sleeping with a virgin could cure the virus, in turn spreading the disease through rape to younger and younger victims. She has publicly called for an end to taboos discussing the disease and sexuality.
Furthermore, it’s possible that the statements attributed to her are rumours, not fact. Wangari feels that her very limited comments have been taken out of context, and that she is waiting for truth and guidance like everyone else. She made public a statement about AIDS on her website, which said, “It is a new, silent, powerful, misunderstood and overwhelming threat to peace and security on the continent. Walking around the villages burying the dead beside the graves of their relatives, the reality of losing tens of thousands to AIDS-related illnesses leaves me and fellow Africans with tremendous pain and fear for the future.”
I have a dream…that at some United Nations rock out, Madonna and Wangari get together. Madonna feels the whole of her world domination has had a purpose that she didn’t even know about in the selfish, sex-crazy days of her beginnings- Raising Malawi. She had never heard of Malawi, she admits, when someone called asking her for help for the orphans. Now she has used her massive fame to kick the sleeping into action, whether it be voting, adopting, safe sex, or contributing to peace and social justice. Her movie Raising Malawi indicates the future direction of her work, which she believes is just beginning.
If Mother Africa and Mother Madge get together, on Oprah, everything will be solved in a few days. It’s more than time to let the ladies take over- the men in power have had their turn and showed us nothing but war and greed. Let’s see if an alliance of women would need more than four minutes to change the world.
Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
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Fascinating People
