KENYA: Who is Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan environmentalist who tomorrow picks up her Nobel Prize for Peace? She spoke to Kieran Cooke in Nairobi.
Wangari Maathai ponders her continent's future. Women, she says, will be Africa's salvation.
"Women in Africa carry the burden of poverty and conflict. We've been waiting for Africa's leaders, who are mostly men, to change. Women have a vital role in challenging the men to be responsible to us and to our children - to stop sending them off to die in their wars. We must not let our future slip away from us."
Prof Maathai - she has degrees in biological sciences from universities both in her native Kenya and from the US - is the first African woman to receive the Noble Peace Prize. Called the continent's "Forest Goddess" for her years of work planting trees and rejuvenating forests, Maathai has never been afraid of confronting Africa's male-dominated governments.
Kenya's former president, Daniel arap Moi, described her as a "mad woman" and "a threat to the order and security of the country", while a minister in Moi's government, apoplectic at being bettered in debate by the 64-year-old mother of three, called her "an unprecedented monstrosity."
Maathai laughs off such assaults on her character. She has important business to attend to - centred round her passion for trees and preventing further logging leading to soil erosion and desertification.
"Planting trees is a matter of life and death," she says. "A lot of people wonder why a highly educated person would spend time digging holes and planting trees. The Nobel committee, in recognising the work we are doing here, has made a wonderful decision."
When the Nobel prize was announced, Maathai's name was relatively unknown outside Africa. But for nearly 30 years she has been causing a stir in Kenya and elsewhere on the continent.
In 1977 Maathai, from Nyeri in the once lush uplands of Kenya, founded a loosely knit organisation called the Green Belt Movement with the aim of reforesting land and stopping soil erosion. Since that time the movement - mainly made up of village women - has been responsible for planting between 20 million and 30 million trees in Kenya and throughout Africa.
Describing herself as "a daughter of the soil," Maathai had grown increasingly concerned about the state of her native landscape. "Forest, grasslands, fauna and flora were all disappearing at a terrible rate," she says. "Without vegetation, people were going hungry. I was hearing complaints from women and discovering a lot of malnutrition in my part of the country."
The first time Maathai came to the notice of officialdom was in the late 1970s, when she walked into the forestry ministry in Nairobi and demanded 15 million seedlings to plant trees to prevent soil erosion and to provide wood fuel for the poor. She came away with all the seeds she wanted.
While much of Maathai's work has been concerned with trees and forests, she has also campaigned on other issues.
In 1989 the then President Moi, along with the late, disgraced tycoon Robert Maxwell, came up with the idea of building a mammoth skyscraper for Kenya's ruling political party in a park in central Nairobi. Maathai led the public protest.
"We owe billions to foreign banks," she said. "The people are starving. They need food, medicines and education. They do not need a skyscraper."
In the end the project did not go ahead but Maathai paid a heavy price for taking on the political establishment. Faced with death threats, she fled along with her children to Tanzania. On her return she was arrested and imprisoned and, in 1992, beaten unconscious by police during a hunger strike.
Meanwhile, Maathai's marriage had ended in divorce: her husband said his campaigning wife was "too educated, too strong, too successful, too stubborn and too hard to control."
In 1997 Maathai stood against Moi in a presidential election, only to have officials cancel her candidature at the last moment on a technicality. However, five years later she easily won a seat in Kenya's parliament as Moi was swept from office and the government of Mwai Kibaki took office.
Maathai, who is deputy minister of the environment in the Kibaki government, has no illusions about the scale of the fight to save the environment in Africa. Too often, she says, governments have a skewed vision of development, which in the end does great harm to the environment and does not improve lives.
"Development which plunders human resources - forests, land, water, air and food - is short-sighted and self-eliminating.
"Yet for many leaders, development means extensive farming of cash crops, expensive dams, luxury hotels, airports, big hospitals, heavily armed armies and supermarkets. These are the priorities in national budgets.
"Never mind that they may not reflect the needs of the people who, if asked, would prefer basic needs like food, shelter, education, clean water, local clinics, information and freedom."