Tabitha M Kanogo

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As in indigenous and colonial societies sought to control these aspects of girls and women’ lives, Kanogo contends, “‘Womanhood’ thus became a battleground where issues of modernization, tradition, change and personal identity were fought” (p. 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. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. She believed that it was not a matter for tomorrow and that the environment is [an] everyday issue .

This work is a tribute to the women of Kenya, especially female Mau Mau veterans, whose valor was altruistic. as women traversed fluid boundaries between pre-colonial and colonial, traditional and modern sensibilities in exercising agency over their bodies and minds.

Maathai was a global environmental icon and change agent when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 and joined an elite group of just seventeen women who have received that award from its inception in 1901 to 2018.

Kanogo argues that in colonial Kenya, African women were oppressed and had a lower status than that of African men. Powerful politicians, like the late president Daniel arap Moi, attempted to stifle her efforts, seeing her as a threat to their undemocratic government. No rating/under appeal/rating suspended – there are some services which we can’t rate, while some might be under appeal from the provider. Indeed, Maathai was a woman of many firsts: she was the first faculty member and chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy at the University of Nairobi, the first woman to earn a doctoral degree in East Africa, and the first person to be convicted of contempt of court in independent Kenya. In continuation with the work of other scholars of colonial and customary law, Kanogo argues the colonial state’s interventions in inventing customary law and creating an embryonic colonial legal system opened up spaces in which women seeking to leave undesirable marriages could successfully petition for dissolution.The emergence of individualism amongst Kenyan women and girls, Kanogo argues, involved “normative and geographical migration” (p. 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. Though this type of separation between men and women in studies of colonial projects in Africa has been seen as artificial (Oyewumi, 1997), through cases of the pawning of women, she shows how women surmounted obstacles to survive. The Intervention and Re-Evaluation of Gender Disparity by Women Characters in Macgoye Oludhe’s Novel Coming to Birth.

Yet trouble at home did not stop Maathai from becoming one of Kenya’s most influential environmental activists. Overall, Kanogo’s biography of Maathai will appeal to an audience that seeks to learn more about the history of the environmental and women’s rights movements in Kenya.She fought unremittingly to save urban parks, most notably, Karura Forest and Uhuru Park in Nairobi—both of which still exist today.