(Image source: Capital FM Kenya)

BY TRACY PFEIFFER

ANCHOR LAUREN GORES

You're watching multisource world video news analysis from Newsy. 
 

Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, has passed away.

CNN has more.

ALI VELSHI, CNN AMERICAN MORNING: “Kenyan Wangari Maathai has lost a long battle with cancer. She won the Peace Prize in 2004, spending her life campaigning for human rights and the empowerment of Africa’s most impoverished people. Maathai was 71 years old.”

Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement, a campaign seeking to highlight the ways environmental destruction affect the world’s poorest people. Here’s NTV Kenya.

“Indeed, even before the greatest honor was bestowed to her in 2004, Wangari Maathai was already a household name here in Kenya and beyond. As a founding member of the Green Belt Movement, Maathai’s relentless efforts to protect the environment at all costs saw her engage in endless with the authorities of the time. Her major victories saw Uhuru Park saved from developers, as well as stopping the continued destruction of Karura forest.”

But as The New York Times reports, she did just about everything she could to make a difference.

“Mrs. Maathai ... wore many hats - environmentalist, feminist, politician, anti-corruption campaigner, human rights advocate, [and] protester... She was as comfortable in the gritty streets of Nairobi’s slums or the muddy hillsides of central Kenya as she was hobnobbing with heads of state.”

And as a writer for The Telegraph notes, Maathai was not afraid to get into the thick of a battle, either.

“Mrs Maathai was beaten, tear-gassed and whipped as she took to the streets in protests against environmental damage around Nairobi through the 1980s and 1990s. But as [then-president Daniel arap Moi's] era ended in 2002, Mrs Maathai was elected to parliament and made assistant minister for environment in President Mwai Kibaki's first government in 2003.”

Finally, a few words from Maathai herself, during an interview with The Nobelity Project in 2009.

WANGARI MAATHAI: “There has to be commitment. People have to be committed. It’s not something that you work for the awards. I never knew I would get a Nobel prize. …The one great resource that you have at your disposal: the people. There is nothing like having thousands of people working at the nurseries, producing those seedlings, digging holes, planting trees, watering them, and making sure they survive.”

The Telegraph notes, Maathai was also the first environmental campaigner to win the Nobel Peace Prize and the first woman from east and central Africa to earn her doctorate degree. 



Transcript by Newsy.