Radical Utu. Besi Brillian Muhonja

       Preface

      Literature available on Professor Wangari Muta Maathai primarily focuses on her work with the Green Belt Movement and the 2004 conferment of the Nobel Peace Prize. In most accounts, the scholar and critical thinker are lost in celebrations of the activist, and the activist is very narrowly feted. This book focuses on Maathai’s thoughts, words, and works, locating them in the global map of knowledge production, an exercise necessary to the project of centering African thinkers in the academy and in scholarship in general.¹ With a larger-than-life profile like Maathai’s, it is easy for the person and public history to overshadow engagement with the ideas. For this reason, I invite readers to privilege, in their encounter with this text, the analysis, philosophies, and theories presented.

      The philosophical and theoretical legacies of Maathai’s at times controversy-inspiring life and work have not, until now, been examined in a book-length monograph. Engaging her as a scholar-activist, this interdisciplinary undertaking goes beyond the simple recording of herstory to tease out her world senses and critical thinking on four main subjects: women’s empowerment and liberation, environmentalism, democratic spaces, and globalization and global governance. Writing this book involved years of mining and reviewing publications, speeches, interviews, and news reports by and on Maathai and identifying recurring subjects. I consolidated and analyzed the material, and for each topical area I isolated clusters of themes, which provided directions for framing solid concepts. In order to articulate and engage them, it was necessary to christen some concepts, philosophies, and theories. I endeavored to maintain the integrity of Maathai’s thoughts and words in the processes of functionalizing and naming these ideas and locating them in dialogue with each other.

      The book is quote-heavy to authentically represent Maathai’s ideas and allow the reader access to not just the meaning but also the spirit of her words and voice. Through this direct encounter with her words, readers may trace the development of Maathai’s thoughts and identify fresh associations, concepts, contexts, and frameworks to further the work this book begins. My purpose is to present her ideas and ideals in a way that scholars, activists, and policymakers can study, apply, test, question, critique, or even challenge in their own work. It is not my intent to register Maathai as the absolute originator of all the thoughts isolated during this sojourn into her world. Rather, I outline how the application of her unique lens prompts new practical and epistemological implications for those ideas. Emerging from this exertion a principal philosophy and lens through which I conceive the arguments of the book and which I name “radical utu.”

      Exploring Maathai’s world and world senses, I delineate radical utu as a driving idea and ideal. In a nod to her promotion of indigenous African ways of knowing and languages (Maathai 1995a, 2009b), I use the Swahili word utu to reference