Radical Utu. Besi Brillian Muhonja
as both a philosophy and an active process—individuals and communities (re) imagining themselves as engaged in relations and encounters with other humans rooted in ethics and values of equity and honor for the humanity of others and for their environments.
Actuating utu is an exercise in expediting humanness and humanity. Utu, under different appellations, is a philosophy and principle that undergirds the community organization of many indigenous African societies. Utu is the Swahili word for ubuntu. That concept is a reality in many African cultures and languages, even in non-Bantu areas—for example, nitey among the Wolof in Senegal and The Gambia. The Bantu word has phonological variants across communities, including bumonto in Kichiga/Kiganda (Uganda), bumuntu in Kisukuma and Kihaya (Tanzania), vumuntu in Shitsonga and Shitswa (Mozambique), bomoto in Bobangi (Democratic Republic of Congo), ubumuntu in Kinyarwanda, and gimuntu in Gikongo and Gikwese (DRC, Angola). The term utu is appropriate for this application because it typifies multiple significations. Utu allows us to mediate that colossal inquiry proffered by Maathai—what it means to be human (Maathai 2010a, 16–17)—from a number of perspectives. The noun for “person” in the Swahili language is mtu. Utu therefore, first and foremost, simply indicates the reality of being a person as opposed to another entity. This designation of utu has as its closest English equivalent the phrase “being a human being.” Utu denotes personhood. Utu may also be used to identify one’s unique personality that is grounded by the fact that one has personhood—a performance of personhood, so to speak. Another interpretation of utu is “humanness”—the capacity to “do” being human through exhibiting what would be considered human qualities such as conscience, ethics, emotion, considerate sense, and spirituality. These makings of utu, signifying desirable human nature, are supposed to set human beings apart from other occupiers of our universe (17). As Maathai noted, “They define our humanity” (16). Utu, therefore, also speaks to the common essentiality of humans. She elaborated on the universality of this character of utu, saying, “These values are not contained only within certain religions, neither does one have to profess a faith in a divine being to live by them. However, they do seem to be a part of human nature, and I’m convinced that we are better people because we hold them, and that humankind is better off with them, than without them” (16).
Four chapters of this book, analyzing the identified topical areas through the lens of radical utu, are sandwiched between two chapters that locate Maathai in history. There is a rationale behind this organization. Chapter 1 offers an introduction to cleanse the previously identified limited characterization of Wangari Muta Maathai in the minds of some readers before they engage with her ideas. The chapter also familiarizes those who have not yet encountered Maathai with her life and works. Unlike the rest of the chapters, which combine critical analysis and narrative forms, this chapter employs a predominantly narrative voice to meet the second goal of its inclusion—allowing readers to encounter the person in order to appreciate the making of the critical thinker. Because she did not see the different facets of her life, scholarship, and activism as independent from each other, I present her different roles, practices, and identities as additive, constituting the aggregative creation of the person in history: family member and scholar and public leader and activist and politician.
In the final chapter, I raise the question of legacy and examine the extent to which Maathai’s ideas and ideals have been preserved or propagated in scholarship and activism. Within that investigation, Maathai’s narrative provides a platform that allows me to engage the subject of the historical erasure of critical African thinkers in scholarship, the academy, and beyond. It is my hope that this presentation of Maathai as a thought influencer advances the goals of initiatives responding to this urgent challenge.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to family members, mentors, collaborators, and friends. Vaa Muhonja, Mama, Mideva, Kegehi, Kisia, and Buyanzi, and our children, Yvonne, Ivy, Shani, Adisa, J, Taye, Ella, Amy, and Kay—you continue to inspire and motivate me. I love you. I am grateful to my mentors, Nkiru Nzegwu, Joanne Gabbin, David Owusu-Ansah, Don Boros, and Lamont King, and to my sister, Taimi Castle, and brothers, Khadim Thiam and Evan Mwangi, whose personal and academic insights feed my work and life. I wish to especially recognize Nkiru Nzegwu, who in 2005, sharing my respect for Wangari Maathai, helped direct my admiration of her into academic curiosity. I am grateful for the partnerships I enjoy with the academic and professional staff and students at the Wangari Maathai Institute for Peace and Environmental Studies.
Asanteni sana for emotional, intellectual, and other support to dear friends Peter Ng’ang’a, Ndirangu wa Maina, Ian Mbugua, Angela Rarieya, Gillianne Obaso, Imali “Octi” Onyango, Brian Kiai, Musa Nyandusi, Babacar Mbaye, Marame Gueye, Oyunga Pala, Quito Swan, Betty Wambui, Mollie Godfrey, Lauren Alleyne, Sofia Samatar, Case Watkins, Chris Blake, Heather Coltman, Bill Van Norman, Neil Marrin, Melissa Lubin, Mary O’Donnell, Marina Shafik, Chris Arndt, Ann-Janine Morey, Kristen Wylie, Aderonke Adesanya, Adebayo Ogundipe, Jane Mutune Mutheu, Shadrack Nasong’o, Olufemi Taiwo, Kwame Edwin Otu, Achola Pala, Mshai Mwangola, Kithaka wa Mberia, Tushabe wa Tushabe, Lilian Passos Wichert Feitosa, Gianluca De Fazio, Heather Scheuerman, Chase Martin, Tara Kristiansen, Lars Kristiansen, Benjamin Meade, Terry Beitzel, and Robert Goebel. To interlocutors Stephen I. Ng’ang’a, Stephen Gitahi Kiama, Nzioka J. Muthama, and my Harrisonburg family—thank you. I am thankful to my colleagues and students at James Madison University, who shared the development and explorations of parts of this book with me. Appreciation goes out especially to the Sisters in Session collective, Robert Aguirre, Chris Arndt, Dabney Bankert, Brian Flota, Rose Gray, Angela Carter, Amanda Roadcap, and the Africana Literatures and Cultures Workshop crew. Maureen Kegehi and Rony Wesonga, thank you for helping manage my logistics for research and writing. I recognize the value of the financial support toward the production of this work from the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program and the following sources and units at James Madison University: Provost’s Summer Research Grant, College of Arts and Letters Dean’s International Travel Grant, the Office of Access and Inclusion, the Department of English, and the Center for Global Engagement. Lillie Jacobs and Michelle Pineda-Hernandez, I could not have asked for better research assistants.
Keith Miller, thank you for your skill. Gill Berchowitz, Ricky Huard, and the rest of the Ohio University Press team, working with you has been an absolute pleasure.
1
Birthing Radical Selves
The Making of a Scholar-Activist
This chapter chronicles Wangari Muta Maathai’s experiential history with the topics engaged in the rest of the book—environmental management and justice, critical feminisms, democratic spaces, and globalization and global governance systems. It is my hope that the reader will gain a degree of appreciation for the events and journeys that molded Maathai and shaped her politics and critical thinking. Through the seasons of her life, I recount the advent of her activist and scholarly identities, selves, and roles. I draw her narrative primarily from her memoir, interviews, and media reports and meld it with Kenyan and global histories of the different seasons of her scholarship and activism.
Wangari Muta was born on April 1, 1940, in the village of Ihithe, Nyeri, in the central highlands of what was then British Kenya, to peasant farmers Muta Njugi and Wanjiru Muta, who were members of the Gikuyu ethnic group (Maathai 2007a, 3–4). She was the third of six children and the first daughter of her biological mother. Her earliest memories on record are mostly connected to experiences with her mother, with whom she was very close. Growing up in a polygamous family, she remembered the four mothers living mostly in harmony and being supportive of each other, although she acknowledged the existence of some dissonance in the family and that her father beat his wives (19). Nevertheless, she reflected on her childhood with unmistakable nostalgia. Her earliest memories place her family residing and working on a farm in Nakuru belonging to a settler named Mr. Neyland (14–28). In 1947, Wangari, her mother, and her sisters left the farm to join her brothers on the family’s ancestral