This is cool. From the Washington Post:
Friday’s announcement, by the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee, makes her the first African woman to receive the $1.3 million prize, which is generally regarded as the world’s highest tribute. It was the second straight year that a woman had won the peace prize. Last year, Shirin Ebadi, a lawyer in Iran, was recognized for her work promoting the rights of women and children. […]
While Maathai has not been widely known to the general public, she is a legend among global environmental activists and feminist leaders alike, and a presence at international environmental conferences. She has been described variously as an “ecofeminist,” “ecowomanist” and “Kenya’s Green Militant.”
The impetus for Maathai’s movement was deforestation in Kenya, a process that has taken 90 percent of the country’s forest over the past 50 years. One of the consequences Maathai saw was that women and girls had to spend hours every day searching for wood for cooking fuel.
In 1978, Maathai, then a U.S.-educated college professor at the University of Nairobi, suggested the planting of trees as a way to help rural women survive the decrease of firewood. The movement spread across Africa, and was responsible for planting over 30 million trees. She expanded it to embrace human rights, women’s rights and the politics of democracy.
In 1989, the deep-voiced and statuesque Maathai led a one-woman charge against the autocratic government of Daniel arap Moi, the former president, when he wanted to build a skyscraper and six-story statue of himself in gritty Nairobi’s only public green space.
She lost her case in court. But because of her protest no financiers were willing to work on the project. Today, that area of the park is called “Freedom Corner.”
From time to time she has been intimidated and even beaten by police in the course of her protests. She was hospitalized in Kenya in 1999 after being clubbed by guards hired by developers while she and her followers tried to plant trees in Karura forest.
From a PeopleAndPlanet.net profile:
Instead, she plays them at their own game: “Last time, I told another MP: ‘I’m sick and tired of men who are so incompetent that every time they feel the heat because women are challenging them, they have to check their genitalia to reassure themselves. I’m not interested in that part of the anatomy. The issues I’m dealing with require the utilisation of what’s above the neck. If you don’t have anything there, leave me alone.’ He didn’t say another word.”
Here’s a link to a speech by Ms. Maathai, which outlines her views on the problems Africa faces today. Among many other things, she makes an interesting criticism of Western aid:
For example, most foreign aid to Africa comes in form of curative social welfare programmes such as famine relief, food aid, population control programmes, refugee camps, peace-keeping forces and humanitarian missions. At the same time, hardly available are resources for preventive and sustainable human development programmes such as functional education and training, development of infrastructure, institutional and capacity building, food production and processing, the promotion of creative innovations and entrepreneurship. There are no funds for development of their own cultural, spiritual and social programmes which would empower people and release their creative energy. Such programmes find few sympathizers.
In the current scenario therefore, development programmes which receive enthusiastic support are those which generate much wealth for the international communities even as they put Africans into more debt.
Curiously, Ms. Maathai recieved the Right Livelihood Award, aka “the alternative Nobel Prize,” 20 years ago. So perhaps the Nobel people are beginning to catch up.
She’s also a bit of a conspiracy theorist about AIDS. Oh, well.
maybe she’s right about AIDS.
I’m not a bioengineer, so I can’t address the possibility aspect, but the counterarguements I hear against the tinfoil hat version never actually include a statement of “it’s not possible to bioengineer such a virus with currently existing methodology.”
that doesn’t mean it isn’t, just that I never hear it addressed.
and you know, every once in a while, the conspiracy nuts are actually on the right track.
and did they up the awards at some point? I thought a Nobel netted 100,000.
Karpad: HIV first infected a human sometime in the 1950s or earlier, the earliest known HIV+ tissue sample having been collected in 1959. That’s a scant 7 years after Franklin/Watson/Crick/Wilkins proved the structure of DNA, and more than ten years before Temin and Baltimore would prove the existence of reverse transcriptase. I’m a molecular biologist, I spent four years working on the fine details of HIV replication, and I’ll say unequivocally that when HIV first infected humans, there was no existing knowledge or technology that would have allowed the creation of a retrovirus.
see? was that so hard?
note my position was not “it IS a man made plague” just “I’ve never seen a very effective arguement made against the conspiracy wackos.”
I routinely use Occam’s razor, so I personally had already dismissed the tinfoil version as needlessly complex, but failure to argue clearly and difinitively against tinfoil theories are what allow them to exist, and allow people to ignore real problems. (aka “who cares that women earn 70 cents on the dollar, when the government faked the moon landing in area 51”)
simply dismissing conspiracies as “pfft, that’s crazy” doesn’t actually change those people’s minds or get them to find new priorities. so obviously the solution is not to ignore such statements but to quickly and dramatically offer proof.
Of course the white devil scientists want you to THINK they cracked the DNA code in the 1950s and 1960s. That gets them off the hook for their crimes. They’ve known how DNA works for hundreds of years. The compliant corporate media keeps this a secret, because of Halliburton.
“She’s also a bit of a conspiracy theorist about AIDS. Oh, well.”
Oh well indeed. If a mass murdering terrorist and an incompetent President can win the peace prize, a racist “blame the west for Africa’s problems” nutjob just might be a step up.
Everybody knows that rampant unprotected sex with multiple partners had nothing to do with the spread of AIDS. Kill Whitey!
[Yawn.] Hey, Phi. I’m sorry all the soap didn’t wash out of your white sheet. Maybe next time use a little more cold water ? Oh, and don’t forget to soak your head along with the sheet. At least an hour should do the trick on both counts.
alsis,
Did I say something racist, or was your implication that I belong to the Klan a knee-jerk reaction to someone who disagrees with you?
Does my contempt for the Nobel committee, people who blame AIDS on the white man, holocaust revisionists, etc… make you feel you’ve been personally attacked? Because that’s what you just did to me. You might want to make sure you know a little more about a person, their background, or heritage before you call them a Klansman.
I’m pretty mad, so in the interest of keeping things civil, I’m going to just leave it at that.
What a humanitarian you are, Phi. Your medal’s in the mail. You acusing someone else of being knee-jerk in light of what you yourself have written here is the best laugh I’ve had today. Thanks.
I find it highly suspect that you decided to ignore everything else written about Maathai in favor of getting in potshots at the Nobel folk, Carter, and so forth. Mind you, I don’t agree with Maathai’s theory on AIDS, but your wisecracks [sic] about “Kill Whitey” are at best, simplistic and at worst, offensive. I guess you prove that a person can be “civil” and still be an obnoxious jerk.
I’ve run into a lot of people over the years who have what strike me as very weird theories about AIDS. None of them are Black, for what that’s worth and few, if any, couch their theories in terms of a possible race war. So while Maathai’s views may be disappointing in that regard, they aren’t exactly unique nor unheard of.
[drift] Does my memory trick me here, or does someone else besides me recall a theory that AIDS “jumped” to humans by way of monkey kidneys that were used to culture antibodies for polio vaccines ? [/drift]
Alsis: the polio vaccine theory of HIV genesis has been thoroughly discredited.
I’d like to note that people can have disappointing beliefs and still do good things for the world- not everyone is all good or all bad. But hey, I’m a ‘racist’ i.e. I don’t think whites are imbecile children who have no responsibilty for any of their actions. After all the real crimes against humanity that the west has done against Africa, I can forgive a great leader who has done a lot more than any of us, for being a bit suspcious about the west’s role.
Sure, I think it’s more to do with say, the evil positions of the catholic church against condom use, western drug companies that don’t seem to be donating too many drugs to the aids striken people or saying that countries can legally produce generics and people like W. who has tried to curtail accurate information to the people, to push his own religious agenda, but I’m not at the eye of this particular hurricane. So I don’t know what I would say. I think it is best to celebrate her accomplishments and pretty much not buy into what she says about AIDs.
I admire Jimmy Carter, but I don’t have to live my life by every single thing he has ever said or did.
Thanks, sennoma. Appreciate it.
The article seems to state that Africa’s problems are at least in part caused by the forms that Western aid come in; that they tend to focus on short-term treatment of symptoms instead of long-term treatment of causes. Perhaps. But this is not a phenomenon limited to Western aid to Africa. It is simply easier to obtain sympathy for acute problems, such as starving people, and to get people to donate money for easily understandable solutions, such as food, than it is to show pictures of fallow fields and get people to donate money to help farmers learn appropriate farming technologies and do a better job of growing food. How much of domestic aid to the poor goes to programs such as food stamps and housing allowances, and how much goes to education and training? This is human nature, not particular discrimination against the Africans.
Another issue is that when the differences between one culture and another seem to be the origin of the one culture’s problems, the sympathy factor lessens. How many of the problems in Africa stem from long-institutionalized treatment of women that would be abuse in the U.S.? How much comes from a failure to see beyond tribal affiliations? How much come from fantasies that diseases such as AIDS are caused by Western conspiracies and can be cured by sex with virgins, as opposed to facing up to real causes and real solutions; the latter has been done in Uganda with solid success, adopting chastity outside of marriage, monogamy inside of marriage, and safe sex practices in any case.
Last I heard, the HIV virus jumped to humans through the consumption of monkeys…But that was a while ago.
I know little about AIDS, but knowing what I know about smallpox blankets, the CIA intentionally spreading crack cocaine in black neighborhoods, and the well documented non-response to AIDS while it was mainly a “gay problem” (among other examples I can’t cite from the top of my head), I would not hastily toss aside theories claiming some intentional malice as regards the AIDS virus.
Don’t forget the CIA mind control rays that force risk-averse, monogamous Africans to have promiscuous risky sex, Samantha. Those rays are a menace.
you know, I wouldn’t generally say “three partners in a lifetime” is promiscuous, Robert.
in fact, I’d call it downright prudish.
and that would be more than enough to get you AIDS in some parts of africa at this point.
not to mention being born with it.
it’s not like there’s a walgreens you can run to and pick up a pack of trojans.
I’d be lack of HIV testing would be a good place to start, too. and just blood testing problems that we handled pretty well almost twenty years ago that third world countries took a while to catch up on.
I really don’t know where this image in your mind of “Africans fucking everything in sight” came from, but it’s giving me the creeps. it sounds like it comes from the same [url=http://www.ferris.edu/news/jimcrow/values2.htm]place as the legends about Black Delaiahs and Bucks[/url]
don’t get me wrong, the practice of raping virgins, believing that it’s a cure for aids is really, really creepy too. but they have the excuse of not owning a computer, so they can’t google and find out that it doesn’t work.
At this point, to have unprotected sex with three partners, in Africa, would not be something I would characterize as “prudish”. YMMV.
It certainly isn’t what anyone would characterize as prudent, I hope.
It should be stipulated that many African women, and undoubtedly some African men, are under duress, or otherwise have limited power to shape their own sexual choices. That is, of course, very shameful in any culture, and I wouldn’t hold someone in that position responsible.
You are free to attribute whatever motives to me make you comfortable, but I am simply discussing facts. I don’t think an emotional state is a good filter through which to judge these difficult questions.
Amp, bean, lucia,
It looks to me like nobody’s posted on the blog since Sunday. Is everything OK? Or is it just that my browser is not updating the page for some reason?
Robert, you didn’t make clear if you disbelieve the intentional spreading of smallpox, the CIA’s involvement with cocaine trafficking into Los Angeles, or the Reagan Administration’s lack of response to the coming AIDS epidemic due in large part to homophobic myths surrounding the AIDS virus.
So as not to clutter up this discussion, email me which you disbelieve and I’ll provide resources for further investigation.
Samantha, those are all interesting issues. They don’t have anything to do with the spread of HIV in Africa, particularly at this late date.
Just to review:
Let us assume that some evil racist white organization, somehow, created the AIDS virus in the 1940s or 1950s.
Let us further assume that they introduced the virus into Africans back then.
Let us further assume that Africans bear zero responsibility, for some reason, for the subsequent spread of the disease, to the present day.
With all those stipulations, we then have to ask: if an African contracts the HIV virus, today, who, exactly is responsible?
I believe the answer is quite clear, and obvious, to anyone who believes that the same principles of personal responsibility and predictable causality apply to Africans as to the rest of the human race. Do you believe that?
My point was not about AIDS, it was about not dismissing out of hand the idea that organized genocide happens not infrequently among humans..
I’m thoroughly confused by your convoluted straw man argument, but my point about the human (and American) capability to commit genocide stands without getting into the particulars of AIDS.
anyone see this? (courtesy Bob Harris)
as Mr. Harris points out, this would mean that Maathai’s autobiography can’t be published in the US without government approval.
hey, an actually good reason to pull stuff up from the archives! I kinda feel like I should follow this up by screaming “buy cialis” over and over…
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