Unbowed

In this first chapter, Maathai explains both the origins of her own family and those of her country, Kenya. She was born on April 1, 1940 in the village of Ihithe, near the small city of Nyeri. She later moved with her family to Nakuru, to the farm where her father worked, which was owned by a British settler named D. N. Neylan. Her father was polygamous, in keeping with the custom of Kikuyu men of his generation. He had four wives in total, including Maathai’s mother. The Kikuyu community is “one of forty-two ethnic groups in Kenya and then, as now, the most populous” (3). 

Many beliefs and traditions of Maathai’s culture have been diluted or lost through the influence of white Christian settlers. British and European settlers divided up Kenyan land in an arbitrary way, forcing different Kenyan communities to live together. Settlers also planted foreign plants on Kenyan soil, installed a cash economy in a community that had been based on bartering, and imposed their own diets and religious customs on Kenyans. Maathai herself converted to Catholicism.

Maathai also describes the unequal way in which Kenyan soldiers fighting in World War I were treated, an unfairness which later led to the Mau Mau uprising.