A Catalyst for Change, by Way of Kenya

Wangari Maathai's Vision for Africa Is 'Taking Root'

People want life wisdom, they just tend to want it right now, without all the mess of going out and acquiring it.

Wangari Maathai has lived 69 years of it. In her native Kenya, she's lived through colonialism, independence, political oppression, beatings for her unique mix of ecological and social activism, even served a brief stint in parliament. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004. Wrote a memoir, "Unbowed," that still sells around the world.

Here she comes, walking into the lobby of the J.W. Marriott Hotel in downtown Washington on a recent morning. She's got the warm smile, the disarming laugh, the brown eyes that can be laser or welcoming lamp.

Both looks are on display in "Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai," an hour-long PBS documentary that debuts on Channel 26 tonight. She's also got a new book out, "The Challenge for Africa," taking on the continent's ills instead of just Kenya's. She studied in the United States and in Germany in the 1960s, and is still amazed at the gap in life experiences between Western countries and those of Africa.

"It's just hard for people here to imagine ruling people who don't read; they can't write, so you can't reach them through newspapers," she's saying, in her lilting English. "They can't imagine how hard it is to communicate even through the radio, where you don't have a lingua franca in one country."

She estimates that in Kenya, perhaps 40 percent of the population can understand English and Swahili, the primary languages of parliament. The rest are on their own.

"People get unrealistic about Africa," she's saying, leaning forward in her chair now. Substantial changes to four dozen countries spread out over an area nearly triple the size of the United States will be generational, she says, not something that's going to happen in three or five years.

In "Taking Root," viewers get an idea of the patience required to make significant progress in one country. In interviews with friends, fellow activists and through use of archival news footage from the 1980s and 1990s, you get to see Maathai at work planting trees, educating women, taking on dictatorial President Daniel arap Moi.

Then, you see Kenya today, and you see how far there is still to go.

Maathai came home from college in 1965, inspired by both her education and the civil rights movement. She earned a doctoral degree (in anatomy) and was the first woman to chair a department at the University of Nairobi.

She noticed the deforestation in her home district of Nyeri, caused by decades of farming techniques brought by British colonists, then worsened by the rapacious administrations that followed independence. She had the idea of encouraging disenfranchised women in rural areas to plant trees, thus halting erosion while improving land and water quality. The Green Belt Movement was born (to date, it has planted more than 35 million trees). It did not take the government long to notice that the environmental lessons were spilling over into social activism. Maathai urged her planters to work around police interference.

"Move with the wisdom of the serpent," she is seen counseling them at one meeting in the 1980s, "and with the gentleness of the dove."

That could last only so long. In 1989, Moi wanted to demolish Uhuru Park in Nairobi and build a skyscraper. Maathai and her followers were able to stop it by staging protests in the park, the police confused by how to deal with women who would not move when told.

Other, more bloody confrontations followed. In 1992, she was beaten into a coma during another protest, this time over political prisoners. Police beatings stopped that day only when elderly female protesters began stripping naked, thus shaming their younger male assailants. Maathai and her followers won again -- and yet it was another decade before Moi would be voted out of office.

"I think I knew about social justice and environmental justice, but seeing how the Green Belt Movement has really helped women change their own lives was enlightening," says Lisa Merton, the Vermont-based filmmaker who, along with her husband, Alan Dater, spent six years getting the film made. "It was a lesson in how change takes place."

Maathai gets up to go. On this trip, she's already been to Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands. This day, she has an afternoon presentation at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, the next day at the National Press Club, and then it's on to Chicago, San Francisco. And then back home.

"The country itself is so beautiful, so wonderful," she says. She's smiling. She's optimistic.

You wonder how many people like this it would take to change a country, a continent, a world.