Independent Lens is airing the documentary about Nobel Peace Prize laureate and Rights Readers author (Unbowed: A Memoir) Wangari Maathai, Taking Root this week (check your local PBS station for show times). PBS has a website for the show with a timeline, a map of tree planting projects around the world, extra features on the effects of deforestation, lesson plans, action guide and more. The video clips have me excited to finally see this. It looks like the film makes the Green Belt Movement come alive in a way Unbowed couldn't quite manage for me. Here's the trailer:
You might also want to take a look at this editorial by Wangari Maathai in which she argues for a greater voice for the African Union in matters such as the current military action in Libya at the same time she chastises the AU for not pressuring member states to live up to the human rights standards it has pledged to uphold.
Edwidge Danticat (Brother, I'm Dying) won a MacArthur "genius" grant. Her reaction and plans here.
Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran) writes about the connections between the Iranian recipients of this years Anna Politkovskaya Award and the award's namesake and previous winner Natalya Estemirova.
Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International (and Nicolas Kristof) talk about the current state of the human rights movement at NPR's On Point. A very interesting discussion, though we don't learn much about Khan's new book, (The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights).
Bill Moyers interviews Dr. Jim Yong Kim (see Tracy Kidder'sMountains Beyond Mountains) about the connections between our current national healthcare debate and global health issues.
Ted Conover (Newjack)is interviewed by On the Media about the ethics of his undercover reporting at Sing Sing prison.
Before you go any further, visit the Amnesty International USA site to take action on behalf of Wangari Maathai, author of our March selection, Unbowed.
Kenyan human rights defender and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Professor Wangari Maathai received three death threats on her cellular telephone on February 19, 2008, as did two people working for her.
These threats read, ‘‘Because of your opposing the government at all times, Prof Wangari Maathai, we have decided to look for your head very soon, you are number three after Were, take care of your life.” The threats were signed ‘‘Mungiki.” The “number three” refers to the two Members of Parliament who were killed at the end of January.
The website for the Greenbelt Movement does provide some reassurance that Wangari Maathai's security detail was reinstated on March 5. Of course the site is worth exploring to learn more about the movement (pictures!).
There are many Wangari Maathai interviews available on line. This interview is the one that brought Unbowed to my attention, and here's another recent one from Democracy Now. Asked about Iraq,
And in Africa, in particular, I know we have many wars. We have a war in Darfur. We have wars in many other countries like the Congo, in West Africa, in Somalia right now. We are still having these wars. And these wars, when you look at all of them, you realize that they are all about resources. It’s the question of who is going to control the resources in this country, who is going to be included, who is going to be excluded, who is going to be in charge of these resources.
I think that if we would get the message that the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave us in the year 2004, we would sit back and rethink again: Isn’t there another way of managing these resources, of sharing these resources, of being more inclusive, of allowing everybody to play a part to benefit, so that we do not have to fight and kill each other, so that we can have the supreme control of these resources?
Speaking of Faith has an interview and slideshow of Kenyan women (accompanied by Wangari Maathai singing!) In addition to the Greenbelt Movement's activities, learn more about the United Nations Environmental Programme's "Plant for the Planet" project to plant one billion trees in 2008 here. NPR has a report on how this program is working in Indonesia.
For a taste of Wangari Maathai's inspiration: Mount Kenya is a UNESCO World Heritage site and a photo gallery and video can be found here. PBS Nature has a feature on the fig tree, The Queen of Trees. When I first saw the title, I thought this was a reference to Wangari Maathai herself! Watch a trailer here.
The latest Amnesty reports and actions on Kenya can be found here. Also of interest, another Rights Readers author, Michela Wrong, offers some insight into recent events in Kenya in the New Statesman.
Finally, while there are many Wangari Maathai videos available on YouTube, try this for a taste of her storytelling skills,
Our group's Kenya expert, Paula Tavrow, who spends large parts of the year doing health-planning work in East Africa, has told us that the Nobel Prize acceptance speech by this month's author, Wangari Maathai, is well worth reading. Here's a link to read this online.
For March we have chosen Wangari Maathai's memoir, Unbowed,
In Unbowed, Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai recounts her extraordinary journey from her childhood in rural Kenya to the world stage. When Maathai founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977, she began a vital poor people’s environmental movement, focused on the empowerment of women, that soon spread across Africa. Persevering through run-ins with the Kenyan government and personal losses, and jailed and beaten on numerous occasions, Maathai continued to fight tirelessly to save Kenya’s forests and to restore democracy to her beloved country. Infused with her unique luminosity of spirit, Wangari Maathai’s remarkable story of courage, faith, and the power of persistence is destined to inspire generations to come.
Last month at our discussion of Ken Saro-Wiwa we talked about our need for human rights heroes to embody our concerns and motivate our activism and this month our protagonist is a little girl in quest of heroes who embody truth and justice. Naturally, reading a comic book this month ones mind drifts to other pop culture heroes and their crusades for justice. I have a vague recollection that during the 40th anniversary campaign for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, some Amnesty section was planning to produce a comic book with a human rights superhero. Now I find the United Nations University of Peace (in Costa Rica) describes a 2004 Human Rights Day lecture, "Human Rights - The Language of Superheroes: Transforming the Foundations of Human Rights from Universalism to Superheroism," where a faculty member, Hassan El Menyawi, made the following observations,
Professor El Menyawi exposed the major problematic of human rights: that it depends on the compliance of the nation-state, and more fundamentally, by relying on the nation-state to comply, it effectively produces complacency on the part of individuals who do not see human rights as something they should be applying, or attempting to establish on their own. After all, the state should be the one doing the complying. It is the state that decided to become a signatory?.
Professor El Menyawi describes this construction of the state as the single source of human rights compliance as problematic. Such state-centrism is difficult to understand. It is often argued that human rights are too individualistic, but maybe human rights are not individualistic enough? How could we depend on a state to actualize human rights, and totally forget about everyday individuals?.
Indeed, it is the individual which interests Professor El Menyawi, who uses the example of the superhero to draw insights about the role of activism and its importance in human rights theory and practice. He claims that scholarly literature has not yet integrated the role of activism into the theory human rights, but that there is plenty of discussion about how the state is the center of human rights agreement and compliance.
He reminds us of the superhero, superheroes like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Spider-Man, and Angel, and Batman, and Daredevil. They all rely on their will, on their reputation, and on their courage to create a world based on human rights. It is these superheroes who become the very vehicles of human rights compliance, says El Menyawi.
He wonders if the focus on the nation-state might have made us forget about the obvious: that if we want it [i.e., human rights], let s go out there and get it, construct it, make it happen. El Menyawi continues, saying that superheroes deploy their courage, sense of sacrifice to establish human rights. This is an important source of international law, and international human rights compliance. It is the source of the great accomplishment of Wangari Maathai, who, with her courage and self-determination, re-constructed the world, transforming it, once without forests, now with forests.
Wangari is a superhero, with qualities no different from Buffy, Spider-Man, Batman, or Daredevil. We should study the psychology, the identity of superheroes, to come closer to understanding activism. We should study the superhero to launch and develop a theory of activism in the human rights scholarship.
This is exactly the kind of peptalk we activists could all use going into this year's Human Rights Day Global Write-a-thon. We are all superheroes, capable of amazing letter-writing feats of daring-do!
Some links featuring Ken Wiwa, the author of In the Shadow of a Saint:
Ken Saro-Wiwa Foundation. Note in the Board Members section that it offers a glimpse into what Ken Wiwa is doing now. I know I was impressed enough with the quality of his writing in Shadow that I'd be interested in the book he is now writing. Now if we could just get a US edition published in paperback!
Following up on the lead above, I did indeed find commentaries on the NPR site. Here's one on Belgium's apology for their part in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba.
Here's a recent interview from Democracy Now, also featuring Kenyan Nobel winner Wangari Maathai.
His Toronto Globe and Mail page (even is you don't venture past the registration wall) gives you a sense of his current concerns.
this week (check your local PBS station for show times). PBS has a website for the show with a timeline, a map of tree planting projects around the world, extra features on the effects of deforestation, lesson plans, action guide and more. The video clips have me excited to finally see this. It looks like the film makes the Green Belt Movement come alive in a way Unbowed couldn't quite manage for me. Here's the trailer: 
Prize winners corner:
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