‘Taking Root’ reveals refreshing radicalism of Wangari Maathai

Wangari Maathai was alive, well and already destined for immortality before she helped Lisa Merton and Alan Daker make her autobiographical documentary film, Taking Root: The Vision of Wangari Maathai in 2008.

She had already made history and broken so many records for women’s achievements that her name was world renowned. She didn’t need a movie to make her famous!

She had been the first female doctorate from East Africa, the founder of the award-winning Greenbelt Movement which had inspired tree planting among rural women and men not just in Kenya but throughout Africa and the rest of the world. And she was the first African woman to ever receive the Nobel Prize for Peace.

So having a film made about her life was not anything unusual for a woman who had rubbed shoulders with monarchs and prime ministers as well as with rural peasants and hard hitting journalists and MPs.

Yet we can be so grateful to Merton and Dater for taking on the project of making Wangari’s movie because who could have foreseen that she would leave us while she was still in her prime. She was 71 when she died of ovarian cancer.

Wangari’s healthy early upbringing and education feature significantly in Taking Root, revealing a good deal about how this great woman came to be who she was.

The stark contrast between what she experienced as a child in Nyeri and what she found upon her return from scholarly studies in the United States (having been one of the few women who were part of the historic airlift of Kenyan students to the US in 1960) is one of the things that inspired her to take up the monumental challenge of reforesting her homeland by starting the Greenbelt Movement.

The film brings out the way she remained grounded and humble while working closely with rural women, first as the chairperson of the National Council of Women of Kenya, then as the founder mother of the Greenbelt Movement.

But it also shows how she was bound to become a ‘freedom fighter’ and human rights advocate, having grown up in the space where the founder of the ‘Mau Mau’ Land and Freedom Army, Dedan Kimathi had also come from.

Wangari’s radicalism is rarely emphasised when we refer to her as a former university lecturer, MP, assistant minister and Nobel Laureate. But Taking Root reveals this side of her, the side that fought the former President Daniel arap Moi and saved Uhuru Park, Kenya’s equivalent of New York City’s Central Park, for posterity.

It’s also the side that stood with the mothers of political detainees at the tipping point when Moi realised he had to relent and open up the government to multiparty democracy, the mothers and Wangari’s influence having proved to be too powerful even for him.

Taking Root allows Wangari to tell her own story. But it also lets others who were close to her through the years give eye witness accounts of this great women’s influence on their lives and the lives men and women all over the world.

Whether you knew Wangari well or not, you will come away from Taking Root knowing she still lives in all the seeds she helped to plant both in Mother Earth and in a myriad of individuals’ lives.