Tabitha M Kanogo

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The Intervention and Re-Evaluation of Gender Disparity by Women Characters in Macgoye Oludhe’s Novel Coming to Birth. Maathai was a global environmental icon and change agent when she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 and joined an elite group of just seventeen women who have received that award from its inception in 1901 to 2018. As in indigenous and colonial societies sought to control these aspects of girls and women’ lives, Kanogo contends, “‘Womanhood’ thus became a battleground where issues of modernization, tradition, change and personal identity were fought” (p. In her biography of Maathai, Tabitha Kanogo articulates how Maathai saw solutions to the problems in modern African society as holistic: she was simultaneously challenging sexism, environmental degradation, class inequality, and political corruption. The sexuality of mobile women unnerved administrators and elders, who reacted by attempting to codify the abduction of women, divorce, rape and polygamy within the law, as described in the second chapter.

This activism put her on a collision course with the Kenyan government from 1978 to 2002, as the regime became increasingly authoritarian and corrupt and progressively failed to deliver basic services to the majority of the population. An activist most of her adult life in Kenya, Maathai paid heavily for her outspoken and at times biting criticism of the government. Consumed by a desire to achieve political freedom for all Kenyans, she pursued her quest for democracy and respect for human rights in multiple ways, such as demonstrating at Uhuru Park’s Freedom Corner with the mothers of political prisoners and vying for political office.

She casts women as victims whose morality, sexuality, and physical and socioeconomic mobility society sought to control. This book explores Maathai’s life within the historical, socioeconomic, and political contexts of her time. These shortcomings added to suspicion caused by the employment of male dressers as midwives, the marginalization of traditional midwifery and the accommodation of expectant mothers in wards alongside the sick.

The emergence of individualism amongst Kenyan women and girls, Kanogo argues, involved “normative and geographical migration” (p. Since her family could afford the cost of private education, she obtained a Catholic education in Kenya and continued her postsecondary studies at Benedictine College in the United States, thanks to a sponsorship from the African American Student Foundation and the Kennedy Airlift program.

However, girls and women negotiated their social, economic, sexual mobility through their own individual concepts of personhood. In the same chapter, she intimates at some gender conspiracy, of men against women--which neutralizes her previous representation of the colonial system as "liberating" and "privileging" to the agency of African women.

She pursued a master’s degree in biological sciences from the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.She waged a fearless struggle to protect forests and water catchment areas and encouraged sustainable and equitable utilization of all natural resources. The chapter argues that the few women who traversed normative and geographic boundaries to obtain degrees reflected change in how their communities viewed the economic, social, and cultural positions of women. Overall, Kanogo’s biography of Maathai will appeal to an audience that seeks to learn more about the history of the environmental and women’s rights movements in Kenya.

Chapter seven on formal education is the richest chapter, analyzing some gripping oral testimony by individual Kenyan women who struggled to obtain secondary and post-secondary education in the 1930s through the 1950s. Focusing upon the law, missions, schools, marriage and the household, Kanogo explores the myriad of responses by women to colonialism.Rather, the analysis of women and girls’ negotiations of “the colonial moment” reveals heterogeneous stories of contradictions, conflicts, and negotiations in determining women’s’ agency, social standing, and identities.