The first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize - BBC World Service, Witness History

My mother was often asked, were you afraid? You were fearless. How can you do all these things? And she said, no, I was afraid. But she said what needed to be done was so compelling that I had to do it. I also remember her describing her mother being a farmer. Her mother grew all the food that they ate. And then she goes away to school, to university out in the United States. She comes back and joins the university as a very young member of academic staff. She was struck by the issues that were being presented by women who were very much like her mother. They were talking about lack of fuel, lack of water, and lack of nutritious food. And everything they described, she felt was connected to a degradation of the landscape. And so why not plant trees? She asked them. The women here till the lunch. So it is important that they know how to conserve this soil. She founded the Green Belt Movement in 1977 to help women plant trees, and at the same time begin to understand how to heal the land themselves. It's 50 million trees now and counting. Very quickly, the Green Belt Movement became more than just about planting trees. Public land was being parceled out to the friends of the administration of the day. Protecting these spaces necessarily becomes political. Curro Forest was by far one of the scariest battles. It was vicious. She got very physically hurt. She was in hospital. But she survived. And so whenever she survived, she knew it was time to go back and finish the work of saving the park. But she also was a human rights activist, a women's rights activist, to challenge the president and the party of the day. That was gutsy. An ecologist from Kenya has become the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. She just didn't believe that it was her. But it was one of the most amazing moments to see her enjoy the spotlight and the platform in a way she'd never had before. I think the whole day she sort of spent saying, I didn't know anyone was listening. My mother died on September 25th, 2011. She's left quite a legacy, I think. Certainly for us as Kenyans, as women, as Africans, one woman from Nyeri in the highlands of Kenya could be such a potent force for change. Remains one of the most inspiring things for me.