Wangari Maathai keeps bagging them. She did it in life, including the winning of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize and the record seems to have followed her even after she died in 2011.
She dug a deep hole, giving her a firm profile in her environment “little thing,” as the former Kenyan Environment assistant minister would put it.
Now, her name is on a tight shortlist of 15 trailblazing women who Brussels — the capital of Belgium — is considering to pick for a name change on the country’s longest tunnel that bears the name of King Leopold II whose statue was pulled down during a protest in 2020.
A committee of experts drew a list of 10 while the rest came from the residents of Brussels.
If she were to bag this one, her name and that of Kenya, where she was born in Nyeri in 1940, would be more pronounced.
The Kenyan embassy in Brussels is already asking the public to vote for Maathai, who was the first woman to place seeds in Norway’s ‘doomsday’ seed vault in February 2008.
The Svalbard Global Seed Vault that sits on a lonely island in the Arctic Circle, accepted the first loads of 100 million seeds from more than 100 countries. The list included potato, maize, cowpea, barley, rice, wheat, and sorghum. The vault has a capacity to store, under the harshest conditions, up to 2.5 billion seeds, providing an assuring backup.
At its launch, it was Maathai and Norway premier Jens Stoltenberg who placed the first seeds, giving the Nobel laureate a larger than life profile as the crusader who champions the search for a friendly and peaceful environment that delivers sufficient food.
Nonetheless, it is a tight race with the name of Marie Curie, the woman scientist who blazed the trail in winning the Nobel Prize, on the list. It is also heavy with Belgians who left a mark in different fields like film-making, medicine, politics, human rights and music. In Africa, Maathai is battling it out with Sophie Kanza, the first Congolese woman to complete secondary school, and Nigeria’s asylum seeker who died young Semira Adamu.
However, Maathai, the author of Unbowed, may just deliver the gong, which, we think, should challenge the educated and students — especially girls — across the world to learn and stick to a particular cause even though the world is leaning towards a multiplicity of talents.
Against all odds, Maathai, who became a member of Parliament, planted millions of trees, fought battles with the mighty including Daniel arap Moi, who was Kenya’s President for 24 years since 1978, and won. She helped to save save important spaces like Karura Forest and Uhuru Park in Nairobi where a public road – Forest Road — was renamed in her honour.
It was Martin Luther King Jr who said that a man who has not found something worth dying for then is not worth living. This is how professionals, some taking practice oaths, are supposed to operate in the search for a just world.
It is this kind of commitment that is cited and recited during university graduations, exhorting graduands to “read and do all” about their professions. Sadly, many graduates are malleable, taking part in corruption.
Under King Leopold II, millions of lives were lost in central Africa. His statue was uprooted during the Black Lives Matter push.
A shortlist of all dead women, the renaming of the Brussels tunnel that is under renovation since 2018 reveals a careful search that, among other attributes, seeks to celebrate a rare commitment while also correcting the ills of colonial brutality and gender imbalance.
Maathai is recognised in the shortlist by Brussels Mobility, the coordinators of the name change, as “a Kenyan scientist known for her commitment to sustainable development, and peace.”
Apart from Maathai, the rest are Andree De Jongh (Belgium, died 2007), Rosa Parks (US, 2005), Annie Cordy (Belgium, 2020), Chantal Akerman (Belgium, 2015), and Isala Van Diest (Belgium, 1916), the first female university graduate in Belgium.
Also making the list are Marguerite Yourcenar (1987, Belgium), Queen Astrid (Belgium, 1935), Marie Curie (Poland, 1934), Elisabeth of Belgium (1965), Semira Adamu (Nigeria, 1998), Simone Veil (France, 2017), Antoinete Spaak (Belgium, 2020), Sophie Kanza (DRC, 1999), and Marie Popelin (Belgium, 1913).
The name change is a deliberate effort by Brussels to honour women, say the organisers, since only 6.1 percent of the streets in the city named after individuals honour women, which is “unrepresentative of the social role of women in the city, past, and present.”
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