Unbowed

Maathai attended Catholic boarding schools, first at St. Cecilia’s near Nyeri and later at Loreto Girls’ High School outside of Nairobi. During this period, she becomes fluent in English, converts to Catholicism, and changes her name to Mary Josephine. She develops close relationships with many of her nun teachers and becomes accustomed to the rituals of regular Mass. The nuns emphasize the importance of speaking English over African languages, a form of colonialism that Maathai acknowledges: “While the monitor approach helped us learn English, it also instilled in us a sense that local languages were inferior and insignificant” (60). 

While Maathai is at St. Cecilia’s, the Mau Mau rebellion breaks out in Kenya. This is an uprising of the Kenyan people against their colonial administrators, led by Jomo Kenyatta, who will later become Kenya’s first President. The uprising deeply affects Maathai and her family, separating them from one another. Maathai’s mother is forced to stay in an internment camp for several years, while Maathai is placed in a different camp when traveling from her school to her home. The dangerous and inhumane camps are attempts by the British government to control their subjects. However, Maathai is taught at school that it is the Mau Mau movement that is dangerous and lawless: “The British propaganda kept us naïve about the political and economic roots of the conflict and was designed to make us believe that the Mau Mau movement wanted to return us to a primitive, backward, and even satanic past” (64).