Freedom Corner

This guide to Freedom Corner in Nairobi's Uhuru Park turns on a March morning in 1992, when six elderly women, among them Monica Wangu Wamwere, Leah Wanjiru Mungai and Ruth Wangari Thungu, sat down and began a hunger strike, demanding the release of fifty-two sons held as political prisoners. It reaches back three years earlier to environmentalist Wangari Maathai's own stand on this same patch of park, against a planned sixty-story tower. Stand at the corner and picture the circle of mothers waiting for an answer from the attorney general.