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Anticipation builds for Nobel Peace Prize winner’s appearance

Wangari Maathai

The upcoming appearance of Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai is drawing a lot of interest from the University community.

“There certainly is a lot of excitement,” says English department chair Sheree Meyer, who helped bring Maathai to the campus. Maathai will share her life and thoughts with students during a free appearance at 11 a.m., Friday, Sept. 21, in the University Union Redwood Room.

She won the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize in large part because of her work with the Green Belt Movement, a project she founded. The network of rural African women has planted 40 million trees in Kenya since 1977, helping not only the environment, but also the development of greater democratic participation. As Maathai said when accepting the Peace Prize, “sustainable development, democracy and peace are indivisible.”

The Nobel laureate’s autobiography, Unbowed, will be part of the University curriculum. For the first time, a number of freshman seminars are adopting the work as a common book to study, Meyer says. Boatamo Mosupyoe, director of Pan African Studies, also notes the relevance of Maathai’s work to her program and to a better understanding of Africa.

The event is already filling up; 55 Freshman Honors program students are planning to attend, and 25 students each from Saint Francis and Sacramento high schools are scheduled to be there, too.

Maathai is in Sacramento as part of the California Lecture series and has a busy itinerary Sept. 21, taking part in a tree planting at the Capitol with state and local officials at 12:30 p.m., and speaking for the CALectures series at 7:30 p.m. at the Westminster Presbyterian Church.

Tickets for that event are $30 and available at 1-800-225-2277 or www.tickets.com. For more information, call (916) 737-1300.

“I think it’s going to be an impressive event,” Meyer says of Maathai’s campus appearance. Meyer notes that Maathai was the first woman in Kenya to earn a doctorate in science and was one of the first elected to that country’s parliament.

For more information on Maathai’s campus appearance, call the English Department at (916) 278-2875.