Africa’s First Female Nobel Laureate Bows To Cancer

Kenyan Environmentalist and Nobel Laureate, Professor Wangari Maathai is dead. She passed on in the early hours of Monday in a hospital where she was undergoing treatment for cancer. The news was broken by the Green Belt Movement, an organisation founded by Maathai. She was aged 71.

Though she was a Veterinary Anatomy Professor, she devoted most of her time to human rights campaigns and the empowerment of poor people in Africa.

She once served as a member of the Kenyan Parliament and she won the 2004 Nobel Prize for Peace due to her environmental conservation work in her home country.