Why are some women deemed great yet others deemed just ordinary??

What, in your opinion makes a woman great in her achievements?

Great African Woman is one who is able to both educate and touch others by inspiring and igniting dreams.

A woman who is comfortable to be a great leader, mother, daughter and friend, one who knows her strengths as well as her weaknesses, a woman who display a richness beyond material things; who isn’t scared to realize her dreams and works with community, country and continent in mind, unselfish, dedicated, persistent, even in the face of great trials

Nzingha Queen of Matamba, Queen Mother Yaa Asantewa, Candace, Empress of Ethiopia, Queen Amina of Zaria, Nehanda Great Mother Of Zimbabwe, Nani of the Maroons, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, etc: These are just the few African women known to us in history who have excelled at directing great and mighty nations, and led determined and competent armies into battle and founded magnificent and enduring royal dynasties as well as tiredly fought to free their people from slavery of mental and physical kind. These were great women by any standard, uncompromising and unwavering with their objective to achieve nothing less than total emancipation of Africa and African people all over.

I hope most of us take the time to study these women and teach our daughters.

This is a book

The Pride of Black British Women by Deborah King

ISBN 1-870518-34-9

Synopsis

There are famous and non famous women in this books its lovely including my mum Linda Tomlinson .

Role models play an essential role in the development of society as they provide positive images for young peole to aspire to.

Pride of black british woman has been produced to provide young people, particularly young balck people who were brom in britain,with postive images and riole models of woman who they can relate to, identitfy with and aspire to emulate.

this book features a collection of brief profiles, focusing on the educational and career achievements of successful black women in Britain over a wide range of professions. including doctors, teachers, journalists, entertainers, writers, sportswomen, Members of Parliament and media personalities.

Bellow is one of my favourite of what it means to be a GREAT woman. Abandoned by her ex husband for being too educated, too stubborn and just "too much" of everything, she has gone on to create one of the most successfull grass root movement of modern Africa:The Green Belt Movement. Though this movement she has managed to bring about environmental change in Kenya that would have been impossible without her dedication and good old hard work.


She is also a champion of women's rights(particularly rural women), human rights and the overall African development. Humiliated throughout President Moi's presendency(she was beaten up on the street by president Moi's troops after he called her a "trouble maker") she never complained or even contemplate giving up her fight for justice. She embodies what it is to be a GREAT woman.......bringing about revolutionary change through perceiverance and dignity. I couldn't think of a better role model than the Lady...clp)clp)


About Wangari Maathai


Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources, Republic of Kenya
Member of Parliament, Tetu Constituency, Nyeri District, Republic of Kenya, Founder and Former Coordinator, the Green Belt Movement

Wangari Muta Maathai was born in Nyeri, Kenya, East Africa in 1940. The first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree, Prof. Maathai obtained a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Biology from Mount St. Scholastica College in Atchison, Kansas, USA (1964), a Master of Science (M.S.) in Biological Sciences from the University of Pittsburgh, USA (1966), and pursued doctoral studies in Germany and the University of Nairobi before obtaining her Ph.D. in Anatomy in 1971 from the University of Nairobi. In 1976, she became Chair of the Department of Veterinary Anatomy, and, a year later, Associate Professor in the Department of Veterinary Anatomy, both at the University of Nairobi—the first woman in the region to attain those positions.

Prof. Maathai was active in the National Council of Women of Kenya (NCWK) from 1976 to 1987 and was its chairperson from 1981 to 1987. It was in 1976, while serving in the NCWK, that she introduced the idea of planting trees using ordinary people. She continued to develop the idea into a broad-based, grassroots organization called the Green Belt Movement (GBM), launched in 1977. GBM’s main activity involved women’s groups planting trees to conserve the environment and empower themselves by improving their quality of life. Through GBM, Wangari Maathai has helped women plant more than 30 million trees on their farms and in school and church compounds across Kenya.

In 1986, GBM established a Pan-African Green Belt Network. Over the years GBM has exposed a number of people from African countries to its community empowerment and conservation approach. As a result of GBM sharing its experiences and its belief in grassroots participatory methods to solve local challenges, a number of individuals have established GBM-like tree-planting initiatives in their own countries, or have used some of GBM’s methods to improve their programs. To date, initiatives have been successfully launched in Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Lesotho, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe, among others.

In September 1998, Prof. Maathai launched a campaign formed out of the Jubilee 2000 Coalition. She played a leading global role as co-chair of the Jubilee 2000 Africa Campaign, which advocates for canceling the backlogged, non-repayable debts of poor African countries. Recently, her campaign against “land grabbing� (illegal appropriation of public lands by unscrupulous developers) and the rapacious “re-allocation� of forest land has received much attention in Kenya and the region.

In December 2002, Prof. Maathai was elected to Kenya’s parliament with an overwhelming 98 percent of the vote. She now represents the Tetu constituency, Nyeri district in central Kenya (her home region). Subsequently, in January 2003, President Mwai Kibaki appointed her Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources in Kenya’s ninth parliament, a position she currently holds.

Wangari Maathai is internationally recognized for her persistent struggle for democracy, human rights and environmental conservation. She has addressed the United Nations on several occasions and spoke on behalf of women at special sessions of the General Assembly for the five-year review of the 1992 Earth Summit. She served on the Commission for Global Governance and the Commission on the Future.

Over the years, she and the Green Belt Movement have received numerous awards, most notably the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize. She has also been a Kennedy fellow. Others awards and honours include the Sophie Prize (2004), the Petra Kelly Prize for Environment (2004), the Conservation Scientist Award from Columbia University (2004), the J. Sterling Morton Award (2004), the WANGO Environment Award (2003), the Outstanding Vision and Commitment Award (2002), the Excellence Award from the Kenya Community Abroad (2001), the Golden Ark Award (1994), the Juliet Hollister Award (2001), the Jane Addams Leadership Award (1993), the Edinburgh Medal (1993), the UN’s Africa Prize for Leadership (1991), the Goldman Environmental Prize (1991), the Windstar Award for the Environment (1988), the Better World Society Award (1986), the Right Livelihood Award (1984) and the Woman of the Year Award (1983). Prof. Maathai was also listed in the UN Environment Program’s Global 500 Hall of Fame and in June 1997 she was named by the Earth Times as one of 100 people in the world that have made a difference in the environmental arena.

Ladies, surely we have too many examples of GREATNESS in this proud race of ours for all of you to be soo quiet?

c'mon....

As I mentioned before the book The Pride of Black British women. My mum was an ordinary great woman she just had the passion to help our children. I doubt she sees herself as great! She just did her thing no matter what people said to her, she devoted 20 years of her life to educating black children and breaking barriers.

Vision and commitment to her people. This are attributes of some of our greatest women.

Drusilla Houston's work touched me long before I knew who she was, historically in terms of our struggle.

Never forgotten


"Houston was one of a handful of women espousing the themes of the early race writers using history as her medium. She was particularly unique in that it appears she was the only black American - male or female - who attempted a multi-volume history of ancient Africans grounded in the antiquity of the people of the Upper Nile Valley civilizations - namely the ancient Cushite/Ethiopians."

http://wings.buffalo.edu/faculty/res...history/we.htm