By CLIVE MUTISO Nairobi

One morning three months ago, 30 helmet-clad riot police wielding automatic rifles were arrayed in front of a hastily erected steel gate that barred the way into Karura Forest, on the outskirts of Nairobi. They stood guarding the site of what many Kenyans were calling an environmental outrage. More than a third of the 1,000-hectare forest had been sold to land developers for a luxury housing project backed by President Daniel arap Moi, and 20 hectares had already been cleared--less than a kilometer away from Nairobi's world headquarters of the United Nations Environment Program. A week earlier, protesters had invaded the site and burned $1 million worth of bulldozers and tree-cutting equipment. Another demonstration had been scheduled, and the police were ready for trouble.

A rickety bus rattled up the road, halted at the edge of the forest and disgorged 28 passengers--all of them old women. Then came a pickup truck carrying their weapons--not clubs or rifles but gardening tools and watering cans. Finally a small car pulled up, and out strode their leader, Wangari Maathai, an imposing 1.7-m-tall woman in a long blue dress and a red-and-black polka-dot head scarf. She picked up a pot containing a 60 cm Meru oak seedling, but the police refused to let her carry it into the forest. In a soft but determined voice she spoke directly to Chief Inspector Paul Muluma: "Since you are illegally preventing us from planting trees in the forest and I do not want this one to die, I am going to plant it at the gates of the U.N. Environment Program. Do you think you can stop me?" As Muluma just shook his head, Maathai led her troop of grandmothers in a procession to the UNEP gate and ceremoniously planted and watered the tree. UNEP executive director Klaus Toepfer, meanwhile, issued a statement condemning the clearing of Karura Forest and let it be known that his staff would water the young Meru oak every day.

Only a strong person would defy the iron regime of Kenya's President Moi, and Maathai, 58, fits the bill. An anatomy professor at the University of Nairobi and the first Kenyan woman to receive a Ph.D., she founded the women's Green Belt Movement, which has planted 7 million trees in Kenya and inspired similar efforts around the globe. In 1989 her protests forced Moi to abandon his plan to erect a 62-story office tower in a Nairobi park. And in 1991 her activism became a political force when she helped start an opposition group called the Forum for the Restoration of Democracy. Once she was teargassed and clubbed unconscious by police. Another time she was arrested and put in a jail cell overnight with no mattress. Always her popularity and idealism have stayed intact.

This time, though, she may have gone too far. No one is saying whether Maathai encouraged the burning of the bulldozers or overzealous followers acted on their own initiative. She claims that thugs were hired to beat up members of her movement and then destroyed the machinery in a fit of anger when they were not paid what they were promised.

Whatever the truth, Moi has made no move to punish the influential Maathai, who has won environmental awards from countries all over the world. In an October speech at National Stadium on Kenyatta Day (honoring Kenya's first President, Jomo Kenyatta, and other independence heroes), Moi declared, "There are mothers in this country who have no respect for public property. They burn other people's property." But when Kenyatta's daughter Beth Mugo, who was taking part in the ceremony, tapped the side of her head with her forefinger and grimaced at Moi, the crowd roared its approval.

Since then police have given up trying to stop Maathai's indefatigable followers from planting tree seedlings in the cleared portion of Karura Forest. And because most people rich enough to buy a home in the proposed development would now be embarrassed to do so, the project is expected to collapse.

While Maathai appears victorious, she has received threats since the bulldozer destruction. "A man called to say that I would pay for the damage with my life," she says, "but so far nothing has happened." So far.

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