The Challenge for Africa

Description

Nobel Peace Prize-winner Wangari Maathai offers a manifesto for C21st Africa. In this urgent yet optimistic new work, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Wangari Maathai provides a unique perspective on the fate of Africa. Informed by her three decades as an environmental activist and campaigner for democracy, The Challenge for Africa celebrates the enduring potential of the human spirit, and reminds us that change is always possible.

Wangari Muta Maathai was born in Nyeri, Kenya, in 1940. She is the founder of the Green Belt Movement, which, through networks of rural women, has planted over 30 million trees across Kenya since 1977. In 2002, she was elected to Kenya's Parliament in the first free elections in a generation, and in 2003 was appointed Deputy Minister for the Environment and Natural Resources. The Nobel Peace Prize laureate of 2004, she has three grown children and lives and works in Nairobi.

I hope the world will support her vision of hope -- Nelson Mandela From one of Africa's most positive and far-sighted thinkers comes a wonderful book combining an elegant critique of Africa's troubled past with a rallying cry for how Africans can use culture, nature and self-belief to reverse their continent's decline. The Challenge for Africa is a milestone in African writing that both educates and inspires -- Tim Butcher Penetrating. . . a 21st century manifesto for Africans, drawing on her own experience as a worldly Kenyan, street-fighting activists, member of parliament and, from 2003-2006, government minister. Her analysis is thorough. She reaches into African history, culture, psychology, contemporary politics and fragile ecosystems * Financial Times * Like a Nelson Mandela or a Mahatma Gandhi, Maathai stands way above most mortals * The Guardian * Wangari Maathai is a prophet for our time -- Alexandra Fuller