Here is the list of African Nobel Prize winners:
2011: Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and peace activist Leymah Gbowee share the Peace Prize with Yemeni activist Tawakkul Karman for their "non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's right to full participation in peace-building work."
2005: Egypt's Mohamed ElBaradei wins the Peace Prize together with the International Atomic Energy Agency of which he is general director "for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes."
2004: Wangari Maathai of Kenya becomes the first African woman to win the Peace Prize "for her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace".
2003: South African writer J.M. Coetzee wins the Literature Prize.
2001: Ghanaian-born UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is awarded the peace prize jointly with the world body "for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world".
1999: Egyptian-American chemist Ahmed Zewail wins the 1999 Chemistry Prize for his studies of "the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy."
1993: The Peace Prize is awarded jointly to South Africa's Nelson Mandela, a symbol of the country's fight against the apartheid system, and then president Frederik de Klerk, "for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime and for laying the foundations for a new democratic South Africa".
1991: South Africa's Nadine Gordimer, whose work deals mainly with the racially driven tensions in her country, wins the Literature Prize.
1988: Novel and short story writer Naguib Mahfouz becomes the first Egyptian to win the Literature Prize.
1986: Nigeria's ethnic Yoruba playwright, poet and novelist Wole Soyinka wins the Literature Prize.
1984: South Africa's black Anglican archbishop, Desmond Tutu, wins the Peace Prize for his role in the battle against the apartheid regime.
1978: Egyptian President Anwar Sadat shares the Peace Prize with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who both signed the Camp David peace accords for the Middle East.
1960: Zulu chief Albert John Lutuli, head of South Africa's African National Congress - then a banned resistance movement and now the majority party in South Africa - wins the peace prize for his fight against apartheid.
1951: South African Max Theiler wins the Nobel Medicine Prize for developing a vaccine against yellow fever.
