Access options Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. The story of the hummingbird trying to put out a massive forest fire while all the other animals stand by totally overwhelmed and powerless is a befitting analogy to Maathai’s relentless effort to curb environmental degradation despite daunting political opposition, intimidation, shaming, and even physical abuse. A most important and readable book, which is meticulously documented and explores the complexity of women's experiences in colonial Kenya. While Kanogo’s writing style and structure choice are simple and straightforward, the information is at times repetitive. In trying to determine the age at which women reached majority (if they did so at all) and thus legally existed independently of fathers and husbands, administrators set out on a path fraught with contradictions.

The book is structured around Maathai’s life stages, focusing on milestones and noteworthy events within each chapter.Depending on their location, low-income Kenyans endure different challenges, but they all face poverty in common. Maathai transformed the lives and worldviews of millions of people across socioeconomic and geographic divides, helping some of them overcome their impoverished and dejected livelihoods to become ardent conservationists empowered to improve their lot in life. There, she began her long career as an activist, campaigning for environmental and social justice while speaking out against government corruption. In the same chapter, she intimates at some gender conspiracy, of men against women--which neutralizes her previous representation of the colonial system as "liberating" and "privileging" to the agency of African women. The codification of dowry was part of a broader attempt, described in the fifth chapter, to make marriage more recognizable to European eyes.

However, her pursuit of these issues, for the public good, challenged political interest groups and elicited extensive opposition from the government.By following the effects of the all-pervasive ideological shifts that colonialism produced in the lives of women, the study investigates the diverse ways in which a woman's personhood was enhanced, diminished, or placed in ambiguous predicaments by the consequences, intended and unintended, of colonial rule as administered by both the colonizers and the colonized. Chapter four argues that the increased monetarization of dowry in the late 1920s reflected the shift from marriage as a community event to an individual event.

The fluid nature of customary law in the precolonial period allowed, for example, individual widows to oppose levirate while leaving little legal recourse for women who had been subjected to sexual violence. This series of Ohio Short Histories of Africa is meant for those who are looking for a brief but lively introduction to a wide range of topics in African history, politics, and biography, written by some of the leading experts in their fields. Her husband requested a divorce only eight years after the wedding, claiming Maathai was “too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn, and too hard to control” (p. A constant thread throughout the book is that the examination of individual life cases reveals the complex and multifaceted nature of Kenyan women’s mobility and self-assertion. Her post–Nobel Peace Prize career was dominated by external engagements on diverse international forums.

She fought unremittingly to save urban parks, most notably, Karura Forest and Uhuru Park in Nairobi—both of which still exist today. During her time in 1960s US, she witnessed the civil rights movement, a period that later encouraged her to fight for social justice in her home country. The rural family might experience poverty as a result of diminishing harvests caused by inadequate and overutilized land, and deforestation stemming from an overdependence on firewood and a lack of reforestation can result in soil erosion due to a dearth of topsoil cover. Class and Economic Change in Kenya: The Making of an African Petite Bourgeoise (London: Yale University Press).