The World Reimagined
In 2022, I created one of the globes for the UK-wide project exploring the history, legacy and future of the Transatlantic Trade in Enslaved Africans. Yinka Shonibare CBE designed the structure of each globe, and The World Reimagined invited artists to paint the globes with their own response to different themes.
My globe considered the theme ‘Still We Rise’. Titled ‘Tributaries of Knowledge’, it is a two-sided celebration of the Kenyan environmental activist Wangari Maathai.
‘Tributaries of Knowledge’ on display in St Paul’s Cathedral, London, and in Trafalgar Square, London.
Photographs courtesy of The World Reimagined. Pictured: The two sides of the globe.
about ‘Tributaries Of Knowledge’
Maathai was tenacious and a pioneer. She thought globally and acted locally, leading the fight against environmental degradation in Kenya with an activism that was intersectional; she understood environmental justice to be intrinsically tied to social justice, particularly women’s rights, many years before others in the environmental movement saw the connection. She also understood that sustainable development needed to embrace democracy, culture and religion if it were to be successfully embedded into the fabric of society.
In 1977, in response to rivers and streams drying up affecting food supplies in rural areas, she founded the grassroots organisation the Green Belt Movement, supporting women to work together to grow seedlings and plant trees to bind the soil, store rainwater, provide food and firewood. Today, the movement has planted some 51 million trees in Kenya. Wangari Maathai also worked tirelessly to demand greater democratic space and more accountability of the government in Kenya, which resulted in periods of imprisonment throughout her life. Still, she did not give up. She was tenacious.
In 2004, Wangari Maathai became the first African woman and environmentalist to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
I came across her work in 2011. Just days after I first landed in Africa for a placement at National Museums Kenya, news broke that Maathai had passed away. An incredible national and international outpouring of grief and remembrance followed for days, if not weeks. It was an intense and inspiring way to become acquainted with her work.
The experience sparked for me the question of how I could contribute to positive, constructive, and inclusive responses to the environmental crisis. Her story made me want to join the dots that those in power could not or would not acknowledge and to work interdisciplinarity to hold space for intersectional conversations about our relationship to nature within the public realm. She showed me that one’s efforts need not be so big that they are unimaginable. It can be a simple as planting a tree.
Tributaries of Knowledge references Wangari Maathai’s memoir, in which she recounts growing up near an old fig tree considered sacred by her community. As a child she found the tree and the spring that rose from its roots enchanting. As an adult she understood that her community’s reverence for the tree meant that it provided them with many levels of protection and sustenance.
In designing this globe, I wanted to depict Maathai’s description of her journey to founding the Green Belt Movement as being nourished and informed by many tributaries of knowledge, starting with that first fig tree. While painting, I reflected on how her legacy has shaped the environmental movement in Kenya and beyond, and what seeds she has planted that are only just germinating now, perhaps through unexpected encounters such as my own.
The globe continues to tour with The World Reimagined programme of events, talks and exhibitions.
Pictured below: At St Paul’s Cathedral and at The World of Glass Museum in Liverpool. Photos courtesy The World Reimagined.
