Fundamentally, Maathai’s education was twofold: Western and Kikuyu. Her Western education was provided through typical means: primary, secondary, and university education; however, her Kikuyu education was a far more subtle activity. Her education by her parents and peers is a fundamental part of any culture’s childrearing, both pre-modern and modern. Through examining her education on her homestead, we glean an understanding of traditional human modes of teaching and learning that trace their roots back to pre-history.

Let’s first examine her “Western” education as presented in Unbowed, since this is the kind of education you will be most attuned to. Following this, we will contrast this “formalized” system of learning with an examination of Kikuyu education, both as presented in Unbowed and as understood generally by Kikuyus today. Throughout this textbook section, keep in mind the idea of “living between two worlds” or “dualistic living” which we mentioned in Part 1 of Unit 1 for Unbowed. This interweaving of two modes of learning  perfectly exemplifies Maathai’s dualistic upbringing and shows us the value of both inscribed and prescribed learning.

A Kikuyu’s Western Education

Wangari started her formal education at Ihithe Primary School, thanks to the intervention of her brother, Nderitu, and her mother’s support (Maathai, Unbowed, 39). Here began Maathai’s journey as muthomi or “one who reads,” a scholar. Thus, Wangari the muthomi fortuitously found herself in a world that not only supported the genesis of her intellectual, scientific, and political, but also engendered her environmental consciousness, social-activism, and charity. While school would teach her the modern skills of math, science, and logical thinking, her mother had been teaching her stewardship of the earth, support of women’s agency, and awareness of the well-being of others.

There were also school fees to consider. Even though they were only one shilling and fifty cents per term, that was a lot of money for a rural family then. My mother could easily have said, "We don't have enough money, I need her at home. What is the point of a girl going to school?" Yet, although she had almost no formal education, she agreed with my brother. How grateful I am that she made the decision she did, because I could not have made it for myself, and it changed my life! (Maathai, Unbowed. 39-40)

Her commencement of formal education was no ordinary occurrence. Throughout Kenya (and most of colonial Africa) schools for African children were not widely accessible (like most amenities). So far flung were such schools that it became typical for African children to board with friends or relatives in distant places that were close to schools. Maathai was fortunate that  she and her mother had the ability to relocate to Ihithe, where there was a primary school open to Africans. Compounding the difficulty of general availability of schools, such schools were largely the preview of boys. So many barriers stood between Maathai and her education: gender, patriarchy, race, class, and colonial policies all informed and impeded the educational experiences of female children.

Ultimately, Maathai was one of the few girls fortunate enough to enroll in school; interestingly, in so doing, she joined a small, privileged, and emergent class of African girls, for whom education “might result in social mobility, on the one hand, or ‘social death,’ on the other” (Kanogo 27). Uncharacteristically and again by fortune, education did not do to Maathai in her childhood as it would do to many children: alienated the few educated children from their uneducated peers and so the wider community and family. Maathai would have to wait until her adulthood to experience such difficulties due to her education.

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As a child, Maathai always anticipated school vacations, during which time she would return from boarding school to the village and participate in gardening and Kikuyu community life.

Maathai herself draws our attention to the problem of educational ostracization from one’s “uneducated” family and peers. Furthermore, she shows how this process was an intentional effort by the colonizers to dissociate Africans from their heritage and fully Europeanize them. To do this, colonial education often involved methods of culture shaming in order to “trivialize” African culture and imbue the African child with “self-doubt” and a sense of “inferiority” (Maathai, Unbowed, 59-60). It’s worth excerpting at length what Maathai says about this system of disempowering education provided by the Christian missions:

A common practice [in the mission schools] to ensure that students kept pressure on one another was to require those students who were found using a language other than English to wear a button known as a "monitor." It was sometimes inscribed with phrases in English such as "I am stupid, I was caught speaking my mother tongue." At the end of the day, whoever ended up with the button received a punishment, such as cutting grass, sweeping, or doing work in the garden. But the greater punishment was the embarrassment you felt because you had talked in your mother tongue…. Not surprisingly, none of us wanted to be caught with the monitor and as a result we spoke English from the time we left church in the morning until we said our final prayers at night…. [T]he system worked in promoting English: Even when we went home or met children from school in the village, we tended to speak English. The use of the monitor continues even today in Kenyan schools to ensure that students use only English….

Years later, when we [the educated Kikuyu children] became part of the Kenyan elite, we preferred to speak in English to one another, our children, and those in our social class. While the monitor approach helped us learn English, it also instilled in us a sense that our local languages were inferior and insignificant. The reality is that mother tongues are extremely important as vehicles of communication and carriers of culture, knowledge, wisdom, and history. When they are maligned, and educated people are encouraged to look down on them, people are robbed of a vital part of their heritage. I am very glad I did not lose my desire or ability to speak Kikuyu, because this helped ensure that a gap did not open between my parents and me, as it has for some of our children for whom education became synonymous with Westernization. (Maathai, Unbowed, 59-60)

Beyond the points already made, there are two important points to take from this passage. First, we should note that when these educated children returned to the village, they “tended to speak English” even with their family and peers. The enforcement of English was so thorough at school that these children lost most inclination to speak their native language, even in the company of other native speakers. This was the first major step in separating these children from their heritage, since (and secondarily) “the reality is that mother tongues are extremely important as vehicles of communication and carriers of culture, knowledge, wisdom, and history.” By abandoning their native languages, these children lost connections with not only their family, but also all the knowledge contained in those people and the ties between them.

With that point made, let’s examine the education that Maathai would have also received via those cultural-familial ties that many of her African peers across the continent would have been relinquishing.

A Kikuyu’s Traditional Education

Let’s begin our examination of Kikuyu traditional education with this observation from Maathai about her education at St. Cecilia’s:

As we became fluent in English, we were also shifting in other ways—moving from a life of traditional dancing, singing, and storytelling to one of books, study, prayers, and the occasional game of netball. (Maathai, Unbowed. 59-60)

While probably by now we recognize the presentation of Maathai’s dualistic upbringing, what we should pay attention to here is the specific aspect of “storytelling” (and perhaps also “singing”) as parallel to “books” and “study.” Maathai here is unconsciously speaking of methods of pedagogy (the art of teaching): one that involves “books” – inscribed (written) knowledge – and one that involves “storytelling” – prescribed (before that which is written) knowledge. In fact, as anthropologists and Kikuyus themselves will tell you, Kikuyu traditional modes of education fundamentally are premised on storytelling. Maathai herself draws our attention to this aspect of Kikuyu culture: 

Because Kikuyu culture was oral, refined methods had been developed of passing knowledge to, and shaping the values of, future generations through, among other activities, stories. Many of the stories had become very elaborate and subtle, like myths, because they had been told in various forms over many generations. Kikuyu stories were filled with animals with human characteristics—both bad and good. (Maathai, Unbowed. 50)

By being an “oral culture,” namely a culture that passes knowledge via conversation primarily or exclusively rather than the written word, Kikuyu’s relied heavily on storytelling to transmit moral, cultural, and practical knowledge from generation to generation. Often these stories were told around the fire in either the Nja or a Nyumba in the evening. Maathai notes that these Kikuyu stories both “reflected [her] environment” and “the values of [her] people;” they were meant to prepare her for a life in the Kikuyu community (Maathai, Unbowed. 51).

The ritual of storytelling, for both children and adults, was a continuous process of cultural preservation, transmission, and evolution. According to Maathai, “it was important to have different people tell stories;” the principle in practice was that “if you hear a story, you are indebted to others and should tell your own story.” (Maathai, Unbowed. 52)

Below, we see two pictures of “Kikuyu school” for children: a community elder, functioning as the local library of collected knowledge, surrounded by a group of enthusiastic youngsters as he tells them stories. The elder, called “Guuka” by the children, is at the point in his life where his social function is to pass knowledge from one generation to another. It is generally true that in pre-modern societies around the globe (past and present) community elders were the repositories and disseminators of knowledge, often pr stories told in social gatherings around fires or through music and dance. It is these three modes of prescribed learning – storytelling, singings, and dancing – that Maathai gave up in the stead of learning English.

According to Mũkũyũ, author and administrator for the Gĩkũyũ Centre for Cultural Studies, such Kikuyu children were learning from these elders “without the self-conscious knowing that they were learning anything great;” these children were “[becoming] learned while still in that happy state of unknowing – knowing not that they knew.” Here, Mũkũyũ speaks of the four stages of knowing, which are embodied in traditional Kikuyu education.

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The four stages of knowing are:

1. not knowing that you don’t know (unconscious unknowing)
2. knowing that you don’t know (conscious unknowing)
3. knowing that you know (conscious knowing)
4. not knowing that you know (unconscious knowing)

The picture shown here perfectly exemplifies these four stages in this practical “educational” experience. In this photo of a woman grinding grain to make gruel, ūcūrū, there are four characters:

1. First is the little baby on the mother’s back. This baby is blissfully unaware of what is happening around it, but it feels the rhythms produced by the mother’s pounding of the grain and making of the gruel; additionally, the baby is also exposed to the sounds, the aromas, the sights, the energy, and the quietudes in the process of making ūcūrū. Through this passive experience it has no consciousness of not knowing but is passively internalizing the lesson without it knowing.
2. The second is the first young girl beside her mother. This attentive child carefully follows the process, consciously knowing that she herself does not know the process she is witnessing but is eager to learn. She knows that she does not know.
3. The third is the second, slightly older, girl in the background. In the shadows of the hut, the older girl separates herself from the process since she believes that she knows the process well; she knows that she knows.
4. The last character is the mother herself. The mother, the central axis of this photo is the true essence of the process she is teaching. She is the one that does not know she knows; she does the action without conscious effort, not knowing that she knows.

While the oldest child thinks she is prepared for full adulthood as a Kikuyu woman, she has not reached the level of her mother, who, in this instance, is the elder, a veteran of the process she is instilling, consciously or unconsciously, in her children. Such tasks, however, could never be mastered until put into practice as a fully functioning wife of a Kikuyu homestead, which is her ultimate goal in traditional Kikuyu society. This would have been the kind of traditional education Wangari Maathai would have received should her parents have not supported her “formalized” education in school.

In addition to  its exceptional rareness, graduating from intermediate school and high school should have been an educationally terminal for Maathai as an African woman; those few women who happened to finish high school typically joined professions like teaching, nursing, or civil service. Maathai, however, had the exceedingly uncommon opportunity to travel abroad and attend university. Why then, of all times, should Maathai fortuitously find this opportunity?

At the same time as Maathai’s conclusion to high school in 1960, the state of emergency officially ended in Kenya and Britain announced plans to prepare Kenya for majority African governance. This was an ill laid plan by the British, who had spent the past two centuries providing the Kenyan population with hard to find and low-quality education if no education at all. In some African countries, according to Muhonja, “the dearth of qualified Africans on the eve of independence was extreme; it was widely held that at independence in 1960, there were only nineteen college graduates in Congo.” So too was Kenya deprived of well-educated Africans; this was the Kenya that “Mary Josephine” (Wangari’s Catholic name at the time) left on her first international trek to receive college education as part of the Kennedy Airlift project, which would provide Kenyans university scholarships to study in the United States.

Indeed, Maathai pursued an academic path that was uncommon for all women, African or not, until the 21st century; her choice of a science major at Mount St. Scholastica in 1960 is evidence of her lifelong path-forging passion. In 1964, she earned her Bachelor of Science degree with major in biology and minors in chemistry and German. A biology major with a minor in chemistry and German. Her decision to pursue graduate studies before returning to Kenya was genuinely unprecedented. In 1965, Maathai earned a master’s degree in biological sciences from the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

Learn More About The Kennedy Airlift!

In fact, it is worth noting that the first group of eighty-one African students who traveled to the United States for higher education were funded by the African American Student Foundation, which worked tirelessly for years in collaboration with Kenyan political leaders Thomas Joseph Mboya and Julius Kiano to raise funds and organize the first student airlifts in 1959. Only with the second group of 280 airlifted scholars (which included Maathai) in 1960 did the program find support from US President John F. Kennedy and the Kennedy Foundation and so take its moniker.

Above, Kennedy Airlift students arriving in New York City (photo courtest of Cora Weiss). To the left, US President Barack Obama (picture before he was president) with Wangari Maathai; Barack Obama’s father was another recipient of the same scholarship as Maathai.

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Upon returning to Kenya in 1966, she was hired as a research assistant at the University of Nairobi. However, due to the colonially fostered lack of qualified intellectuals in Kenya after Britain’s emancipation of it just three years earlier in 1963, Maathai had no sooner started her new job than it became necessary, due to a lack of people trained to use electron microscopes at the University of Nairobi, for her to go back to university for doctorate training. Thus, from 1967 to 1969, she studied at the University of Giessen in Germany and received training in electron microscopy. In 1971, Maathai completed her doctoral dissertation on the development and differentiation of gonads in bovines, and so became the first Central African woman to earn a PhD.

Maathai’s observations on and value of both her informal prescribed and formal inscribed forms of learning is part of what makes her dynamic. While we might place great weight on her unprecedented university education and various degrees, she herself, likely in retrospect, might have found her most valuable education to have been around the homestead fire in her mother’s Nyumba. Maathai’s summative observation on the importance of her upbringing and the education embedded within it are poignant enough to quote at length:

These experiences of childhood are what mold us and make us who we are. How you translate the life you see, feel, smell, and touch as you grow up—the water you drink, the air you breathe, and the food you eat—are what you become. When what you remember disappears, you miss it and search for it, and so it was with me. When I was a child, my surroundings were alive, dynamic, and inspiring. Even though I was entering a world where there were books to read and facts to learn—the cultivation of the mind—I was still able to enjoy a world where there were no books to read, where children were told living stories about the world around them, and where you cultivated the soil and the imagination in equal measure. (Maathai, Unbowed. 52)

We are the stories we hear; we are the stories we carry with us; we are the stories we tell; we are the characters we treasure. It is because of the long power of human storytelling as a form of learning that you are reading Unbowed. Stories are not only the purview of fiction but exist all around us. Each person is a confluence of countless stories over countless years, narratives that have been proceeding for longer than recorded history. Humanity as a global community on the homestead of planet Earth has a profound repository of knowledge, not only inscribed but also prescribed, within the practices and extinct cultures that grow and decay around us. What is the unconscious mother Maathai teaching us through her story weaving? What messages is she both consciously and unconsciously brining to us across cultural, national, religious, racial, sexual, and temporal divides?

Followup Questions:

To be done after reading both the above textbook passage and chapters 1-4 of Unbowed. These answers will be submitted to your teacher. Please answer all questions with a “short response,” which should comrpise either five to ten sentences or fully adress the question with as little or as much information as might seem necessary.

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1. What do you think are “the best of both Western and Kikuyu ideals” as mentioned in this textbook section based on your knowledge of Maathai’s upbringing, Kikuyu education and child rearing, and Western education as you know it? Please provide examples from the reading to justify your answer.
2. Storytelling is important to Kikuyu education. How does storytelling function in Kikuyu education (when, where, who, how, why)? What are the Four Modes of Knowing? How is the book Unbowed itself presented like a Kikuyu story circle?
3. In chapter 4 of Unbowed, Maathai has many new cultural experiences as she lives and learns in the United States of the early 1960s. During this time, she has a revelation about what she does not know and the limitations of what she does know. What was this formative experience she recounts? What two “stages of knowing” in the Kikuyu tradition is she wrestling with? What was the lesson Maathai took from this revelation? What does this experience perhaps tell us about knowing and learning?
4. Maathai tells many stories in Unbowed; through such stories she and we perhaps learn more about her, ourselves, and humanity generally. Below is an excerpted short story from Unbowed. What do you think this story teaches us?

There is no better way to master writing than by reading well-written books.  However, this requires being able to judiciously look at a piece of prose and understand what makes it good.  We’ll practice that here with some quotes from the text.

There are many different elements that can make a piece of writing compelling.  It might be style, syntax, construction, sound, profundity, clearness, brevity, or novelty.  It could well be something else entirely.  Here, we examine a passage in significant detail.

PASSAGE 1:

          Collecting firewood for the household was a frequent activity and I would often help my mother do it. The country was dotted with hundreds of huge tnigumo, or wild fig trees, their bark the color of elephant skin and thick, gnarled branches with roots springing out and anchoring the tree to the ground. Fig trees had great green canopies beneath which grew dense undergrowth. This tree's canopy was probably sixty feet in diameter and it produced numerous fruits that birds loved. When the fruit was ready you would find hundreds of birds feeding on them. The undergrowth of the fig tree was also very fertile because people did not cut anything near those trees but allowed the undergrowth to flourish. All this added to the tree's mystery.

          When my mother told me to go and fetch firewood, she would warn me, "Don't pick any dry wood out of the fig tree, or even around it." "Why?" I would ask. "Because that's a tree of God," she'd reply. "We don't use it. We don't cut it. We don't burn it." As a child, of course, I had no idea what my mother was talking about, but I obeyed her.

          About two hundred yards from the fig tree there was a stream named Kanungu, with water so clean and fresh that we drank it straight from the stream. As a child, I used to visit the point where the water bubbled up from the belly of the earth to form a stream. I imagine that very few people have been lucky enough to see the source of a river. … …

          In my mind's eye I can envision that stream now: the crystal-clear water washing over the pebbles and grains of soil underneath, silky and slow moving. I can see the life in that water and the shrubs, reeds, and ferns along the banks, swaying as the current of the water sidles around them. When my mother would send me to fetch water, I would get lost in this fascinating world of nature until she would call out, "What are you doing under the arrowroots? Bring the water!" I later learned that there was a connection between the fig tree's root system and the underground water reservoirs. The roots bur¬ rowed deep into the ground, breaking through the rocks beneath the surface soil and diving into the underground water table. The water traveled up along the roots until it hit a depression or weak place in the ground and gushed out as a spring. Indeed, wherever these trees stood, there were likely to be streams. The reverence the community had for the fig tree helped preserve the stream and the tadpoles that so captivated me. The trees also held the soil together, reducing erosion and landslides. In such ways, without conscious or deliberate effort, these cultural and spiritual practices contributed to the conservation of biodiversity.

The first paragraph contains many succinct, but descriptive sentences.  Green text indicates the use of literary imagery.  It the first instance, we see a beautiful metaphor connecting this distinctive African plant with one of Africa’s most identifiable fauna.  The pink text could be omitted and would probably not effect the narrative at all.  The reason I say this is that being concise is always better than being verbose and she has sufficiently given us a sense of mystery.  Additionally, you are better off trying not to tell the reader how to feel or what to believe.  Make them experience it through your writing instead.

The light blue text in the second paragraph sets the scene and time frame for us in Wangari’s life. 

In the third paragraph we see more beautiful imagery that personifies the earth as having a belly.  Additionally, this second green phrase contains a bit of onomatopoeic text if read aloud (the words sound like what they describe).  The following blue text may seem as unimportant, but instead of telling us how we should feel, it alludes to how she, herself, feels.

In the final paragraph we see another alliterative (words starting with the same letter that follow one another- some writers try to steer clear of this, but people who enjoy poetry or are versed in public speaking will often choose to incorporate this into their writing) and onomatopoeic construction in green text.  The next set of blue text is particularly important because it is connective tissue between this vignette (small scene within a story) and the larger story as a whole.  The purple text punctuates the story with an important summative conclusion.  One of the truly masterful things Wangari does here with relatively little effort is to weave the structure of the story (the blue text) in between bits of poetic and descriptive imagery.  This way we are not bludgeoned with an idea, but instead led to experience her own formative life lessons.  This is the great beauty of literature; someone else’s thoughts, experiences, and imagination can be incorporated into our own.  

Writing Effectively: Tell Your Own Story

Hopefully, we can incorporate the lessons in the previous two parts into a

bit of helpful writing practice.  Write a short essay (2-4 paragraphs) about a formative experience from your childhood.  Try to incorporate vivid imagery and poetic language.  If it is appropriate, try to include onomatopoeic sounds.