Unbowed: One Woman’s Story
by Wangari Muta Maathai
William Heinemann ₤17.99, 352 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤14.39

When news broke in October 2004 that the Nobel Peace Prize had gone to Wangari Maathai, it put many Kenyans in something of a quandary. On the surface, this seemed an occasion for unalloyed celebration. It was the first such prize for black Africa - excluding South Africa - and it had gone to a Kenyan. But the prize’s committee, in its wisdom, had chosen a woman activist whose bellicosity had appalled male politicians over the years. What’s more, she was being honoured for work regarded by the establishment as a worthy irrelevance at best and a sheer nuisance at worst - planting trees in a bid to slow down Kenya’s environmental degradation.