Radical Utu - Besi Brillian Muhonja Research in International Studies, Africa Series

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and livestock production and caused a lack of basic day-to-day requirements such as food, firewood, and indigenous medicines for many. Kenyans experience consequences of this economically, politically and socially. In explaining why responsiveness to the root causes should inform approaches and philosophies of activism and critical thinking on the subject, Maathai distinguished an always-present connection of the human being to the land. She communicated the importance of sustaining that balance in her lecture “Bottlenecks to Development in Africa,” drawing attention to indigenous African societies where food security was safeguarded at both the family and communal level and relating this to communities’ day-to-day communion with their environments (Maathai 1995a). She spoke of the world of her childhood, where stabilized seasons and sustainable cultures of food production, processing, usage, storage, and distribution steadied food security and good health for not just the people but the physical environment as well. This picture is of an ecosystem in balance, with all the parts of the whole complementing and supporting each other, a reality that is necessary for the social, economic, and physical health and security of communities.

      Having experienced this equilibrium, Maathai sought to pinpoint the source of environmental imbalances and related phenomena experienced in contemporary Kenya and indeed the rest of Africa (Maathai 2006). In an interview with Marianne Schnall (Maathai 2009d), she shared her journey, which began with rural women she encountered in her work. As she was confronted by their narratives expressing basic needs, including water, firewood, income, medicine, and food, she realized they were describing the failure of the environment to sustain them. Critically, she recognized these conditions as symptoms of larger systemic and structural root causes. Specifically, she traced their origins to the scourge of colonialism. Highlighting, like other decolonial thinkers, the impact of colonialism, racism, and capitalism, Maathai particularized the effects of this negative side of modernity to the question of the environment (Maathai 2009b, 233–34). To sustainably address the root causes of environment-attendant issues of underdevelopment, she argued, necessitated an interrogation of the exploitation perpetrated mostly by representatives of the Global North and their allies, spaces they plundered for profit and political control, and their culpability and responsibility (Maathai 1995a; Taking Root 2008). This was an exercise she undertook in relation to Kenya.

      Out of the profit-obsessed colonial cosmos was born a culture of pillaging the environment without any concern for replenishing it. This happened through a deliberate process. To control the land, it was necessary for the colonialists to estrange the people from it. The capitalist and neoliberal ideologies and exercises of colonialism and, later, neocolonialism separated the people from the land, severing the communion that Maathai saw as essential to the survival of both. The expropriation of native land through the 1902 Crown Lands Ordinance stole from the people a personal stake in the land and erased their direct relationships to specific parcels of ancestral land. They became tenants on their own land, which was now owned by the Crown. Further erasure of ownership occurred when the 1915 Crown Lands Ordinance made possible ninety-nine-year leases for settlers (Onyango, Swallow, and Meinzen-Dick 2005, 5; Home 2012, 189–90). The institution of title deeds blatantly appropriated land from rightful owners, even erasing ancestral claims to it (Maathai 2010a, 227), and the creation of native reserves furthered this estrangement. As a consequence of colonialism and this alienation of colonial subjects from their land, a process of dehumanizing was actuated. Along with losing their land, they also experienced a reassignment of identities and ranks in this new societal order, what Maathai outlined as a form of eco-racism (Maathai 2007a).

      As Africans lost their relationship to the land and their environment, their homes were destroyed, their land was appropriated, and forests they treasured for spiritual and other reasons were cut down to build residential native reserves (Maathai 2007a, 62; Taking Root 2008). In the reserves, created as a domicile for the displaced Africans, limited access to land and overpopulation resulted in a shortage of food and other resources (Kanyinga 2009, 327; Maathai 2007a, 67). At the same time, people were forced to migrate to find work for their survival, intensifying the disconnection from the land. The introduction of taxes forced native Kenyans to give up subsistence farming to seek wage labor. The human beings’ relationship to the land was now redefined and corrupted by pressing financial needs and responsibilities. First, land was taken away. Second, the symbiotic relationship of care and use between the human and the land was obliterated. Third, the large numbers of people on small pieces of reserve land and departure from practices that had protected the land for centuries exhausted the land’s productivity and quickly fatigued the soil. Fourth, the dehumanizing regulation of the movements of native Kenyans through the kipande identification system (Home 2012, 179) and the control of their labor affected how and where they worked the land (Kanyinga 2009, 328). The demands of colonialism transferred native Kenyans’ time and labor from caring for their land, if they had any, to caring for someone else’s land—the settlers’—in ways in which the settlers instructed. The new systems forced native Kenyans to farm foreign crop varieties and with methods foreign to their experience.

      Maathai experienced this impact of colonialism personally. She grew up in a reality where white settlers who constituted less than 1 percent of the population controlled over 20 percent of Kenya’s prime land, the so-called White Highlands. Hundreds of thousands of native Kenyans, including her family, were forced to live as squatters (Maathai 2007a, 62) and registered as resident native laborers, a system that KAU leaders called “new slavery.” In this environment, the colonial-era introduction of a cash economy and cash-crop economies across Africa initiated threats to food security. The colonial administrators instructed against indigenous farming technologies and systems, representing them as inferior. Along with this were the introduction of monocultural plantations (Maathai 2010, 243–48) and the discarding of indigenous trees and crop cycles.

      The colonialists’ interests lay in maximizing profits from their colonies through exploiting agricultural production and other resources across the continent. The commercialization of agriculture through the introduction of cash crops inaugurated a food-purchasing culture as the centrality of indigenous crops was minimized. In various parts of the continent during and after colonialism, in order to survive by making enough money to buy the processed food the new realities forced them to consume, and in order to pay taxes, farmers committed what little productive land had been left under their control to cash crops. This was their way of asserting minimal financial agency in the new economy, which had locked out Africans. In Kenya, they planted crops such as coffee and tea, a practice that was detrimental to the soil (Maathai 2007a, 123). At the same time, indigenous trees fell victim to this profiteering scheme targeting natural resources (122). In the same way that cash crops replaced indigenous crops, fast-growing nonindigenous trees that were good for financial gain, including eucalyptus, black wattle, and conifers, began to replace indigenous forests. Maathai noted that for years this destabilization of indigenous ecosystems unleashed on the continent by some countries of the Global North had inhumanely privileged capitalism at the expense of the people’s subsistence and survival—and their humanity (Maathai 2005b).

      The introduction of such trees has been harmful on a number of levels. First, they could not match what the indigenous forests provided to meet the people’s needs. The economics of trees (Maathai 2010a, 86–89), recognizing only the monetary value of trees, hindered people (even scientists) from considering the natural, social, psychological, and ecological services offered by the forests (86). The foreign trees also depleted local biodiversity and drained water resources (Maathai 2005b). These thirsty trees were draining water resources at the same time the land was being cleared of trees that would contribute to rain production to replenish that very reservoir of water the alien trees were exhausting. As an added consequence, indigenous crops that ensured food security were further jeopardized because they could not thrive without water. Even the cash crops introduced in attempts to financially maximize land productivity suffered. In some cases, there was simply an inadequate supply of water. When there was water, crops such as tea, which does not thrive in excessively wet conditions, were destroyed. Even more damning was the fact that loss of soil cover with the clearing of the land led to destructive erosion in parts and affected the production of crops, including those planted for subsistence (Maathai 2005b). Concurrently, manipulating natural environments affected rainfall patterns, which in turn disrupted the predictable planning and cycles of farming.

      Along

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