Wangari Maathai Interview (2003)
Q:
So why don’t we begin with the schools and with the idea of education, because we’re very focused in our film on education as the alternative to child labor, and when I say child labor I don’t mean child work. Children need to work—I mean work that replaces a chance to go to school. Your Green Belt work has involved organizing, educating and working with rural people who are themselves not educated, and I wondered what you think the challenges are, or what your experiences have been in trying to convince these people that education is the future for their children.
WM:
Well, for anybody to really work for the environment, and the big picture of the environment, it is very important for one to understand the linkages between the big picture and the small picture at the household level, and even at the personal level—when something like a forest is destroyed, for an ordinary person in the rural areas to see the connection between that and the fact that the top soil of his field may be taken away the next time the rains come, or his crop yield will be very low because the rainfall didn’t come, uh… or when it came, since the soil was gone it did not get into the soil and therefore his crop fails, and so he has hunger, and the government can not respond to him, and somebody has to go about giving—feeding him. To make
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that linkage requires a certain amount of understanding and education. And so I find that the biggest problem sometimes is to convince people that some environmental issues that are taking place very far from where they are, will have a negative impact on them that some government policies that are being made somewhere far at the capital will eventually have an impact on them at their household level. Now illiteracy, when you are dealing with the people who are illiterate, who don’t read, whose level of information is low partly because it is controlled by a government that prefers to govern people who are not fully involved, informed, it becomes very difficult to work with these people because they almost want to say all the time, how does this benefit me, and if it doesn’t benefit them immediately in a way that they can see, then they are not interested. So how do you get them therefore—to plant the trees, to look for seeds, to persist, to take time because the tree is not going to grow overnight and provide fruits, and firewood, and building material, and fodder. That’s where I find that in our work education becomes very important.
Q:
(inaudible—volume too low)
WM:
Yeah, well perhaps it is—it would be wrong to start from the observations that you make when you at this time in our history, and in
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our economic situation. If you were to go into the rural areas and see what is happening to the children, it is easier to say that perhaps there is not an understanding of the need for education. That would be false because most parents in this country almost over-value education. They want their children to go to education because since formal education was introduced into this country almost about a hundred years ago, it has been projected as the way out of poverty, the way out of backwardness, and towards progress. And of course the western consumerism is usually projected as where you will go if you go to school. So most of the children that you will see not going to school today, except for a few communities that because of the religion don’t send their children to school, or because of their lifestyle such as the pastoral communities which are mostly on the move, the majority of farming communities who are settled uh, and who have been exposed to formal education really want their children to go to school. But the economic situation of many of these families make it very difficult for them to send their children to school, and so, they put them to work. Of course the other aspect of it is if you have bad governance such as we have had in this country over cash crops such as coffee, and tea, and sugar, sugar canes. When farmers are not paid for the—for their produce, and they become very poor, they are not able to hire uh, extra hands from the numerous people in the rural areas that will be Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 3
available. And therefore they tend to use their families, uh, and this is very common on small-scale farms. So you’ll find children there working very hard, perhaps as I say they will not go to school, but they will definitely be put on - on coffee. Uh, and of course there are other areas where there are large coffee plantations which are owned by the large-scale farmers who of course do not use machines to attend to their large-scale farms, they hire humans, and if you have poverty, and you have a lot of children not going to school for the reasons that I have said, then they become a very good source of labor because they are cheap, they can work long hours for all the reasons we know, but people uh, have been exploiting children and have been very insensitive about the needs of children, and will sometimes use children almost like they are adults. So they will overwork them, they will underfeed them, they will overexpose them to even pesticides and such, and this is where of course uh, we question the wisdom—not only the wisdom of the parents, but also the wisdom of those farmers, and the wisdom of the government that allows that. Q:
Do you think that of those poor children who are being worked in this fashion, that girls in particular, bear an additional burden?
WM;
Definitely. There is no doubt about that because as we all know, women everywhere in the world are always the second choice. If there is an opportunity, the boy child will always be given the priority for the
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many reasons that have been written about, and in this uh, in our country, uh, girls—we’re coming out of a culture, a culture that is just about uh…still very much in the horizon—we may be wearing western clothes, and we may speak in English, but we still are very much rooted in our culture, and that culture treats young girls almost like little women. They’re supposed to help their mothers with all the chores that women do, and if there is uh, if there has to be made a choice as to who goes to school, then most likely the girl will be sacrificed, and of course she will be expected to work alongside her mother. So girls definitely do take the brunt of the uh, of the disadvantage that we find among children. And of course girls have even greater problems in the sense that once they’re out of school and they’re working out there, being treated like little women, they get taken advantage of, and before you know, they are pregnant, they, they may – if they’re lucky get married, if they are unlucky, like thousands of them, they’re not married, so they start raising their own families when they are still with their own parents. So we have a lot of children bearing children. And uh, yeah, it’s very sad for, for the women, for the young girls, the damage is great. Now I, I am not very sure now that the boys are any better, but this is partly because of the economic situation that we are in, so that when you go into the streets, the majority of the children in the streets will be boys. In fact I remember when this whole Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 5
phenomenon started in the uh, mid-70’s, when I started seeing children come into the streets, it was almost only boys. But now we know that there are girls there, out there, but there are girls who are not getting children out there with these boys, and so just of course have gotten out of hand completely, and of course when a girl gets— when a girl gets a child out there in the street, what does that really mean? They’re talking about street families. It’s almost inconceivable that children should be allowed to be raising families in the streets.
Q:
Wouldn’t we also see young girls caring for their siblings? In instances where one parent has been lost to AIDS, and wouldn’t we see girls in the domestic sector?
WM:
Yeah, yeah, of course. Most people—we have a phenomenon in this country where we hire servants, uh, it is something that uh, it’s one of the many legacies that we got from the British colonialism in which we institutionalized—and a lot of the people that are now hired, especially to take care of children, are children themselves. And so you find a lot of kids in uh, in households as maids, and sometimes get misused by the master in the house. Uh, uh, and of course with the high rate of AIDS, if children are left alone, unless there is no girl child, the girl child will more often than not be the mother, in inverted commas, of the children that are left behind. But I must say, when children are left
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behind, even boys will sometimes become responsible for the siblings. Uh, so it’s not unusual to see boys taking care of the other children. But if the girls are there, they’re usually the ones who are held responsible and almost become like the mother. Q:
We’ve been filming in coffee plantations and the plants are white with the residues of pesticides. In your environmental work I feel confident that you’ve encountered pesticides. I’m wondering what your feeling is about the exposure of children, laboring children, to these, and whether or not there shouldn’t at least be some education about what they are, how they’re used, and what the risks are. Should children be set aside from exposure to these dangerous chemicals?
WM:
Well, they should, definitely they should, but I want to say that uh, the Green Belt Movement does have a series of seminars, which we give to farmers, mostly farmers who are also involved in tree planting because we want them to understand the big picture about the environment. And we do uh, teach them about chemicals and (clears throat), and generally the commercial agriculture that they are encouraged to practice. And I must say, there is a very strong push for uh, commercial - commercial agriculture, and utilization of uh, pesticides, and herbicides, and everything that goes into it. Our program tries to teach farmers to practice organic farming, and we try to teach them to do that not only because we are very concerned about the damage we are
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doing to our soils through these chemic… agro-chemicals, but also because we know that the, the—many of them who are—because they are illiterate, and because much of the information, even when available, is in English, and therefore they can not read, they do not know what they ought to do. And even if it is in Kiswahili, I tell people if you go into the rural areas of this country, you don’t find people talking in English or talking in Kiswahili. They are talking in their mother tongues, and if they can barely read and write, they read the bible in their mother tongue, not in English or Kiswahili. And therefore there is almost—uh, I don’t want to say that it is deliberate, because I really don’t think it is deliberate. It’s almost based on ignorance that we do not train our people and educate our people, and give them information in the language they can at least read so that they know how to protect themselves from these agro-chemicals. And this is important partly because our people overvalue information coming from abroad. They value things coming from abroad because they have been trained to believe that what comes from abroad is good. And so when chemicals come, they’re good. When uh…education, whatever education comes, it’s good. It’s not questioned. And the government has a responsibility, and the educators have a responsibility, and also organizations like us have a responsibility to train our people that everything that comes from across the borders is not necessarily good Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 8
for you and for your environment. Now until that information is given to the people, people in the rural areas will continue to ignorantly poison themselves and their children. No parent would expose his child or her child to pesticides that are dangerous to their lungs, to their - to their skins, if they knew that this was dangerous. But they don’t—they do not link. Again, if we go back to the issue of education, they do not see agro-chemicals as being poison. They see them as healing chemicals that come to do damage to the bad insects, and the birds, and the bad weeds, but will not do anything bad to them. They don’t make the linkage. They do not see that they too will be damaged by these agro-chemicals in the same way that the insects are, that the worms are, that the weeds are. Now if they would be educated, they would not expose their children. Now, does the farmer, especially in the larger-scale farms, does the farmer not know? Of course he knows because that farmer is usually a person who has gone to school, he will have—he will be able to read that information. None—no farmer at that level would be illiterate. Illiterate farmers that are out there, they are the so-called peasants. But larger-scale farmers are higher educated, quite often politically well-connected individuals in this country, so they know that they are exposing their people to these dangerous chemicals. The question is, why don’t they care? We all know that quite often you have to curtail the greed of businessmen Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 9
and women, and it is the responsibility of the government to ensure that these farmers are required to protect their farmers from these kinds of pesticides and agro-chemicals generally. If there is a law that requires that they do so, and if there is a follow-up to make sure that they do so, you would not have found those children with white skins because of the exposure. But if the farmer can get away with it, he will do so, because many businessmen can be very uncaring in order to make profits. Q:
I feel like I should thank you for that answer for the tobacco children in Mexico, or the sisal children in Brazil, or the coffee children in Kenya. I want to ask you about a different area, kind of more of a cultural area, if you will. I wanted to ask if you see a linkage in Kenyan and African culture—rural culture—the identity of the people between ties to the land, historical and spiritual ties to the land, and the notion within families that it’s fine for their children to work, that it’s somehow is part of their being part of their family and their community, that the working is natural, and that somehow that might also be part of why it’s difficult to make a change.
WM;
Yeah, uh, I think it would probably be flattering to say that Africans feel very close to the land, and therefore they want their children to work. But that is not true. Uh, most Africans when they—and I’m overgeneralizing because I’m talking about a huge continent, so let me talk
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about Kenya. Most Kenyan families don’t want their children to work on the land because the land—working on the land has always been associated with not being educated, being poor, remaining in the rural areas and not going into the cities to look for white-collar jobs, and the glamour of being in the city. So a lot of people uh, will not by option farm unless they are farming as large-scale farmers. So for them, that’s business. They’re really not working on the land, they’re usually sitting in the office, and it’s the poor people who are working the land. Now, having said that, it is also true that a lot of people in this country value land, at least some communities like the central region where you may have gone if you—it’s filming coffee and tea, they love land. But that is almost like a traditional way of uh, looking at land because for them, the—our fathers, and our grandparents, uh, who are now to my children the great-grandparents, over-valued land. Their wealth was in land, women, children, and livestock. But since the introduction of the cash economy into this country, all that lost their original value. Now we value money, and we value cash, and we think that with money we can buy anything. So those children who are working on the land, or those people who are working on the land, are not working on the land because they love the land. It is because they want the money. They’re looking for cash which they hope will provide them with the capacity to buy the basic needs that they need, whether it is food, or Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 11
clothing, or books, or whatever they need, because now we are in a cash economy. But I certainly, as an environmentalist, I’m trying to make them re-love the land, rediscover the value of land, take care of it, utilize it nice—profitably yes, but also nurture it—almost rediscover the values that our grandparents had in taking care of the land. If they really loved the land, they would protect the soils, they wouldn’t not want to see soil erosion taking place as massively as it is taking place. They would not allow the forests and especially the watershed areas to be deforested as the rate that they are being deforested. So when I see them working hard on the land, I know that it is not out of this love for the land that our people used to have. Now they’re rushing, or they are pursuing cash. And whether they get that cash by picking coffee, by picking tea, or by working in some kind of town, or whether they’re getting it because they are teachers or whoever, but it is not out of love for the land. I wish it were. Because if it were, then there would be greater care of the land, and there would not be as much environmental destruction as we see. And, if there was that love for the land, there would be even great concern for the children because after all you hand over this land to the children. That was one of the values that was in our grandparents, that they knew that we are transitory, and we pass this heritage to the next generation. Currently when I look around, it seems like we are not thinking of the next Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 12
generation. If we were thinking about the next generation, we wouldn’t have those children working on the farm. They would be in school being prepared for the next gener… because they are the next generation—being prepared for the handing over. We wouldn’t have children sleeping in uh, on top of garbage and dump weed uh, heaps, and sleeping literally like animals. We wouldn’t—we wouldn’t be able to go to bed knowing that there are children, literally thousands of children, sleeping in dump sites because we would see—we would recognize that that’s the next generation that is being destroyed. Therefore, to whom would you hand over this land? But if all you’re concerned about is today, and cash, and how you can satisfy your greed, then of course it doesn’t matter because it’s only you. So what we really need to rediscover again is the, the value of the Ark, whether it is in the form of the soil, in the form of the mountain, in form of the rivers, in form of the forests. And recognize that we love this because it will sustain the next generation, and the next generation are those children that we see with white hands, and sleeping and eating from the dump sites. Q:
There are outside forces that affect Kenya’s present and Kenya’s future ability to reach the, the condition and state that you have just described. In 1982, for instance, the World Bank imposed on Kenya a Structural Adjustment Program, an SAP, that took a free educational
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system and made it cost-sharing. And so that a country that have ninety percent of those children in school, K-8, standard eight, now has in many areas less than thirty percent. Uh, could you talk a little bit about—you just finished talking about cash, and moving from an agricultural economy that can feed itself essentially, and build a future for itself, and now we have a very big envelope to fill with the World Bank for these loans—the conditions of the loans don’t appear at least on the surface to be very good for the children or the people of Kenya. Would you comment on that? WM:
Yeah, well it’s very easy to blame the outsiders, to blame the World Bank, and to blame the IMF and all the multilateral donor agencies that have been giving Kenya money, and it’s very easy to say that the structural adjustment programs have uh, destroyed our economies. They have done so, but really speaking as a Kenyan, I would say that we have put ourselves in the soup that we find ourselves. If we, that is our government, was to practice good governance, if for the last thirty years or so we have been practicing good governance, utilizing the resources that we have, both human and material, efficiently, without corruption, with a lot of accountability, we would not be in the mess that we are in now. I want to encourage you to stand by Uhuru highway, and count the number of huge expensive vehicles that you will see running down that highway. That is hardly a country that is
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extremely poor. That is hardly a country where more than sixty percent —or fifty percent of its people live at one dollar a day, according to the World Bank data. We are poor, but we are almost the ones who have put ourselves in that situation. We borrowed money, and we borrowed heavily, especially in the 80’s, and even in the 70’s. But nobody has been able to say what we did with that money. We know there is a lot of corruption, we know a lot of people in government have enriched themselves. Some of them are filthy rich, they don’t know what to do with their money. And that money is partly money that we may have borrowed from the World Bank and IMF, so while the World Bank and IMF, and international communities are holding us by the neck, it is partly because we have allowed ourselves to put—to be put in that position. I was part of - our organization, the Green Belt Movement was part of the globe—of the year 2000 Jubilee Campaign that was persuading the international community to cancel the debts of the African Nations because they just can’t pay without sacrificing their people. And part of the sacrifices you have seen—you have seen the streets, you have see on the farms, you have seen—if you go to Kenyatta National Hospital, you’ll see how many people are dying everyday. Uh, if you go to our mortuaries, they are full. Everyday there are hundreds of people picking, they are dead. We are paying with our own lives those debts, because the Kenyan government insists that it Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 15
must meet the commitments to the international community, or the international community will literally let Kenya dry. Our government would probably not last a day if we refused to uh, pay the commitments that we have to the international community. But we are doing it, our government is doing it at the expense of its own people— the way the roads are, I’m sure you saw that. So, the question is, okay, we did put ourselves in this position, but can the World Bank surely, and the IMF, and all those who lent Kenya money, can they genuinely say that they didn’t know that our government was corrupt, that they didn’t know that we were having a very uh, that we were having very poor governance generally, that this money was not being used for the purpose that it was given? If they did, the culture of any bank system, or any lending system is that if you think that the one you are lending to is not credible, you are not likely to get your money back, you don’t lend. And therefore I think that while our governments are very—are to be held responsible for the troubles that we are in economically, the international community bears a very heavy responsibility because they knew. And if it is true that some of the money was actually stolen and is banked in some accounts, it is in the north. It is in the northern banks, and I’m sure the northern countries know that. Why do they protect that kind of wealth? Why can’t they take that money and pay themselves? Because they know that money was stolen from the Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 16
people. Instead of allowing the government to sacrifice—forcing the government to sacrifice its own people to pay these debts, and of course as it has been said many times, uh, these debts have already been paid several times over, the interests have been increased. The international community has refused to pay adequate—adequately for our resources. The coffee that you see people picking, and the tea that you see people picking, they will get peanuts out of it, because the international community doesn’t want to pay up to—but up to a certain level. They control how much we pay, we, we get for these primary agricultural products, and they control what we pay for the cars that I want you to look at at Uhuru highway. So we are completely trapped. In an economic system, a global economic system that continues to insist that if we want to be rich we have to open our doors, but as we all know, no other doors are open. Only our doors must be kept open. So we are really in a very difficult uh, economic trap, if I may call it so, partly self-imposed, but also definitely taken advantage of by people who have the greater political and economic muscle to do so. Q:
What part of that circumstance was created by having one party? You have a one-party system, don’t you?
WM;
Yeah.
Q:
I’m not sure that Americans even understand what that…
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WM;
Well, Americans may not understand the one-party system because they have always had several parties, at least they have had to two major parties in America, and they have a very strong political system that was created by their forefathers who had a lot of vision, and who ensured that no one person would have an overall power over the country, and who would literally rule the country and manage the resources of the country as if they were their own personal property. I’m sure to the Americans it is completely inconceivable. But that is the situation we had here when we introduced a multi-party system. When we became independent in 1963, we were a multi-party system. But in the course of time we completely eliminated all the other parties and became a one-party dictatorship. Now the sad thing about that is once you allow one human being—it doesn’t matter who it is—we can now currently we are blaming President Moi, and we are throwing all stones at him, but it doesn’t matter who it is. If you have a system that allows one person to be in charge, one person to have all power over the land, he will misuse his power. And so a lot of the misgovernance that we had in the last thirty years or so were partly due to the one-party system. Thank god for the last—in—since the last ten years we now have a multi-party system, and it is partly because of the multi-party system that things - we feel that things are changing. We have—we have regained some of our freedom. We have regained freedom of
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speech to a certain extent, although we just had a bill passed that is going to control the press. That’s a regression, and I hope that the next government will not be willing to have this made into law. Uh, we have freedoms of movement to a certain extent. But we are still not a free country because we are still very much controlled by a provincial administration that is extremely oppressive. Uh, we inherited a colonial administration that was of course designed to serve the British Crown, not to serve the Kenyan natives.
(END TAPE 531)
WM:
He, the Kenyatta is the one who actually uh, banned multi-parties in— but he just banned them, he did not eliminate them, uh, and then during President Moi’s time, uh, they were completely removed, and then we became a dictatorship. But what I was saying is that a oneparty system, it doesn’t matter where it occurs, will produce corruption, will produce leaders who are greedy, irresponsible, who just are interested in enriching themselves, are not interested in the country. It’s a real statesman who can be given all that power and use it responsibly, and use it for the benefit of the common good of the country. Now most of us are not uh, (unintelligible), uh, so I want to say that most of us are not that benign, and so it is very, very
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important for systems to be created, structures, institutions to be created that ensure that dictatorships, does not—you know, does not thrive. And I was comparing that to the fact that in the American system even though they have only two major parties, and thank god there are new parties coming in like the Green Party, uh, so that people have more choices, uh, there was the wisdom of creating for example two houses, for creating a president who has given us such an amount of leeway, but he is very much controlled by the two houses, and by many other institutions such as the judiciary so that he just can’t do whatever he wants to do with the country. Now in our situation, uh, we were not—in the one-party system we were in a situation where literally the country belonged to the president. He could do whatever he wants to. He can—even today, he uh, he does it illegally, but he can still issue title deeds to forests. He can give individuals sections of forests. He can decide an open space in the middle of the city, which is used—intended for a playground for children. He can give that away to a friend for political favors, as a political favor for support. And those kinds of things will not happen in a governance system where there are checks and balances, and where the president knows - because the country is not his. He has been given that responsibility, and a privilege to govern the country on behalf of the present and the future
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generations. That’s what we are trying to create. But we are right now in this country in that process. Q:
In Kenya today, according to the International Labour
Organization’s global study, which was only issued about two weeks ago, four million children under the age of fourteen are working, mostly in agriculture, many in what they call the worst forms of child labor, being put at risk, serious risk, and Kenya is the sixth worst African nation in terms of child labor, and Africa as a continent is just behind Asia in the amount and variety of children laboring. What steps do you think should be taken to try and impact this to reduce this in the years ahead, realizing there’s a process. What should be done? What are the things that you, the steps that you think could be taken? Would for instance, funding the Children’s Bill, which your Parliament has just passed, announcing the end of cost-sharing, putting some actual money there, help with – we’ve spoken of the World Bank debt relief, what are the things that can be done now to reduce this waste of human potential? WM:
Yeah, well as I said earlier, parents are concerned about their children, and they want their children to grow up to become useful, and uh, selfreliant adults. I haven’t met a parent, except those who are destroying themselves with alcohol and drugs, who are irresponsible towards their children deliberately and willingly. So I think for me, the first thing
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that we must do immediately, is improve our governance, and that is what is being done. For example, we hope that we will have elections by the end of the year. We hope that this government will be replaced by a more responsible team of governors who will be—who will use the resources of this country more responsibly, and will pass policies that are in favor of children, and generally in favor of people, that a government that will be people-friendly, rather than a government that exploits or facilitates the exploitation of its own people. Now that cannot be done by outsiders, it can only be done first and foremost by Kenyans, and by Kenyan leaders. So that’s what we must do. And the help that we are receiving from the international community is the pressure on President Moi, that he must quit because his time is over, and he must allow for elections to be held, and that eventually we must have a constitution that provides the checks and balances that will allow for us to have a good governance that will ensure that the resources of this country are used properly. Only then can we be able to say children can receive education, children can receive Medicare, and their parents can be protected so that their coffee and tea is not exploited by middlemen who leave them poor and therefore unable to take care of their children. That for me is what I see can be done immediately. Of course the international community can help, but no international community can replace the responsibility of the parents Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 22
initially, and that of their local, you know, the national government. I do not want to say that we are overwhelmed by the population. We are only thirty million people. We are not that many despite what people like to say. We are dying at a terrific speed, speed, for those who are worried about our population. Therefore maybe in a few years time we shall be worried about how few we are, and how few we are who can be productive, because it is the young people who are dying. So the population to me is not an issue. What is an issue at the moment is good governance to be put in place so that we have responsible people, and so that the international community that wishes to assist can assist in an environment where the help can be helpful, can be useful. Because nobody can take care of children better than parents. We can build all of the homes we want, but you cannot produce the same kind of a child, the same kind of an adult, the same kind of a responsible citizen that you want out of a home where children grow without the love and the nurturing of their parents. So what we ought to do is to have programs that facilitate that help, that—empower parents to take care of their children, and to have these children growing up in responsible homes, in unified homes, in homes where for example drugs are not the order of the day, alcoholism is not the order of the day, and where poverty is not so disempowering. Now those—that environment, that economic and political environment Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 23
must be created by our own leaders, and then the international community can be asked for help. But I—sometimes people outside our countries say well (clears throat), they need this, they need that, they need the other. People cannot replace parents. In fact sometimes I want to ask, where are the parents whose children are in the streets? Where does the government—why doesn’t—doesn’t the government not ask where are the parents? Why can’t the parents be held responsible? After all, if any parent tried to kill their children, they are arrested, and they are charged with murder. Abandoning children into the streets, or misusing children as workers is a form of murder. It’s a slow death that you are giving, a sentence of death that you’re giving to the child. The parents should be held responsible. I think too often we leave the parents off the hook. You brought these children into this world, you must be held responsible for them. You cannot allow parents to produce children and then they go about drinking uh, themselves uh, to the level that they can no longer take care of their children—taking drugs so that they can no longer take care of their children. These are responsible adults. They must be held responsible. I think there has been too much leniency in our government. In the traditional system, if those children, if let me say—if my grandparents, the age of my grandparents who did not know how to read and write, who were moving about virtually naked with the skins hiding their Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 24
nakedness, if they were to wake up today they would wonder what the hell happened to their world, because in their time everybody was held responsible for their children. You could not be allowed by the community to produce children and then leave them alone unattended. And I notice, for example, in the developed countries such as America, you cannot leave children alone in their homes—in the home. You have to constantly have children attended to. This is the responsibility of the adults. What has happened here is that adults have abandoned their responsibilities, and the government has allowed them to do so. Men have abandoned their responsibilities. In the traditional societies, every man was required to take care of the children he produced. He may have two wives, three wives, or as many wives as he wanted, but he was bound to take care of them, and to take care of all these children that come out of those unions. Today in our society we have changed the system. Men can be as free as birds. They can produce in a day, and whatever, and whenever, and with whomsoever. But nobody holds them responsible for the children born out of the union. How irresponsible can you hold—how irresponsible do we want to have our people? Men must be held responsible. Women are almost made responsible by the virtue of the fact that they produce these children. They have to nurture them, they have to nurse them. Sometimes, of course, women also become irresponsible and Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 25
they abandon children, they kill children, or they leave them to go into the streets. They too must be held responsible. Now if we had that kind of a law, we wouldn’t have as many children in the streets because half of those children, their mothers and fathers are somewhere loitering around, or uh, sleeping around because they are —they have intoxicated themselves with alcohol or drugs. That should be unacceptable in society. Q:
I have one final question, which is actually again about responsibility. This time, the responsibility of the world community to two hundred million children who labor in mines, on plantations, on fishing platforms, as street children, as prostitutes, you name it, almost anything that you can think of, children exploited for economic gain, and I guess it’s part of the premise of the film, but the notion that all children are basically the same. And that they’re entitled to childhood, and the chance, an opportunity to learn, instead of labor. What is your reaction to that?
WM:
Well I would say that all children are of course the same, uh…and all children should be given the same opportunities uh, to grow up in an environment that will nurture them and make them grow into responsible uh, (clears throat) adulthood, and become adults who can uh, express their potentialities, and I want to say realize their potentialities. But that’s probably utopia, because on the other side
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you can say all human beings are entitled to a quality of life that is decent, that is worth of humans. No matter who they are, their color, their religion, the place where they were born, and (clears throat), if we can make (clears throat), excuse me, if we can accept that, that all human beings have a right to a quality life, a decent life, a life worth humans, then of course children are also there. But if we condemn some human beings into a life that is depressive, that is disempowering, that is so miserable, either because of the color they bear, either because of where they are in the geography of the planet, either because of their religion, then of course those people and their children will be in that area. It is impossible to save children alone. What we must save are communities because children are part of communities, and so if we were to promote a more just society, a more just human society, a society where resources are more equitably distributed, both at the national level in a country like Kenya, and at a global level. If we could have uh, uh, a notion that indeed it is not fair to force Kenya to open up her doors to a global economy if America does not do the same, then (clears throat) we could begin to create a society, a global human society where there is greater equity—not equality, but equity, and greater uh…yeah, I think I would say where there is greater equity. And if we have greater equity then we shall be able to take care of the children. Because I’m giving you an example of Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 27
now, Kenya, one hundred years after Europeans arrived in this country, we now we wear good clothes, now we speak foreign languages, now we drive cars, we fly aeroplanes. But today our children are eating out of dump sites like dogs. A hundred years ago when we could not read or write, when we did not speak foreign languages, when we were alone here, our children were healthy, and they were happy. So sometimes one asks, what happened? We were supposed to have had progress, but it seems like we regressed. We loved children, we nurtured them, we protected them; we did not have a problem of alcoholism or drugs. We had leaders who were responsible one hundred years ago. But today, we are just the opposite. We are almost like a shadow of what we used to be, yet we are one hundred years into modernity. So what has happened? What has modernity done? That’s why I say if my grandparents woke up today and went into the streets and saw those children in the dump site, and saw those young men lying in the parks completely drugged either by alcohol or by drugs, and went into the rural areas and saw that poverty, and saw those children laboring in the coffee plantations, as we say, with their white hands, and know that they’re going to die very quickly, they would not believe what has happened to the communities in the last one hundred years. And so we must ask ourselves, and we must ask our leaders, and we must ask the international community, what kind Int: Wangari Maathai Tape #: 531 Page 28
of world are we building, and how safe are those who think that they’re alright because their children are not in the dump sites? I often tell people in this country that we shall never be safe in this country, until all of us are safe, because sooner or later we all get into the trap, and in many ways it’s the same in the world. We shall never really be safe, and happy, and at peace with ourselves, and we shall never really be able to say that our children are safe, and that they have a world tomorrow until we can say that for all children, for all people, for all humanity. And as an environmentalist, you know, we say that uh, you cannot be too concerned about the human species as if you are not concerned about the other species. So we really have to expand our concept of life, our concept of uh, of the planet, and understand that we humans more than any other species have done so much damage to ourselves—we have also done a lot of damage to other species, and that we, unlike them, we have a special responsibility to restore them, and most of all to restore ourselves. By restoring, there is nothing much I can do to myself. I have lived my life, but I can do something to restore the future by taking care of the children who are the future.
(END TAPE 532)
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