Beyond Borders Scotland and Dove Tales, the Association of Scottish Writers for Peace, collaborated on the Beyond Writing Competition, aiming to facilitating dialogue and cultural exchange through the creative writing and storytelling.    

The competition consisted of three rounds; Inspirational Women, Creative Peace and Beyond Borders.  

This piece by Estelle Price was shortlisted in Round II: Creative Peace. The competition’s judge, Jean Rafferty of Dove Tales, described the piece  as telling the story, in lush and evocative natural imagery, of Wangari Maathai, who was awarded the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize for her work in empowering Kenyan women. Creator of the Green Belt movement in Africa, she helped them defend their land against building work, enabling them to plant trees which would protect their environment and livelihood and give them control over their own lives.

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Peace on Earth 

‘Peace on earth depends on our ability to secure our living environment’ Ole Danbolt Mjø’s words, when awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Wangari Maathai in 2004 

She came with a mother’s heart for the forest.  

Karura, home to monkeys, bush pigs, honey badgers  

its four rivers singing as they journeyed to the ocean.  

Thousand hectare windbreak rooted beside the wide  

savannah, green lung for Nairobi, congested city  

where lorries coughed fumes onto jammed roads. 

With her women, she protested a government’s plan  

to turn public land into villas, apartments, golf courses.  

With her women she planted seedlings, sang to the soil   

at dawn, at dusk while men stood guard with pangas,  

whips, bows and arrows. Walking bare foot  

through marshy ground, Wangari birthed a nursery,  

watering-can and hoe her only weapons.  The way  

barred she danced as she planted trees at the gates. Trees  

like the cedars that clung to the slopes of the Aberdares  

tinting her childhood with a thick deep green. Trees  

like the Olea Africana she would plant with Obama near  

Freedom Corner, ten pulsing years later. Trees  

whose roots still tether the red earth, turn thirsty streams  

into rivers, provide a canopy of arms above downturned  

heads. Red, the colour of blood when Moi’s stones hailed  

around her braids. Wangari, mad* mother of a million trees,  

seven years dead, who knew that from the smallest seed  

a tree could populate the earth with the sap of peace.  

*How President Daniel arap Moi described Wangari Maathai.