When people can't use you, they ridicule what you represent. I was lucky that I understood that, because when one does not understand that, it is very easy to be broken and to be subdued.

What people see as fearlessness is really persistence. Because I am focused on the solution, I don't see the danger.

I have seen a lot of men, for example, who will make a will and include their daughters whether they are married or not. And perhaps the greatest change of attitude is that today, at least in Kenya, if you don't send your child to school - unless it's a matter of poverty or religion, and it is not that there no schools - then people wonder, "why the hell don't you send your children to school?" Now that's a very big jump from when I was going to school and educating girls was an exception to the rule.

Sometimes we become bound by other people's thoughts because we are not sure about ourselves.

It was easy to persecute me without people feeling ashamed. It was easy to vilify me and project me as a woman who was not following the tradition of a 'good African woman' and as a highly educated elitist who was trying to show innocent African women ways of doing things that were not acceptable to African men.

Why has there been so much secrecy about AIDS? When you ask where did the virus come from, it raises a lot of flags. That makes me suspicious.

Culture is coded wisdom