Sekai Holland in Sydney for Peace Prize lecture

This is a transcript from World News Australia Radio.

The winners of the Sydney Peace Prize make up a mightily impressive list, from South African archbishop Desmond Tutu to East Timor independence hero Xanana Gusmao.

Now, the latest winner has come to Sydney to give the annual lecture by the Peace Prize honoree.

Ron Sutton has her story.

Desmond Tutu. Nelson Mandela. Mahatma Gandhi. Martin Luther King. Aung San Suu Kyi.

As the head of the Sydney Peace Foundation, Stuart Rees, sees it, all were models for Sekai Holland -- and she would have been one for them.

But as the Zimbabwean Reconciliation Minister, winner of the 2012 Sydney Peace Prize, sees it, her models from the beginning were simply two people -- her mother and father.

"My parents were very clear that, if you are fighting something, you have to use nonviolent methods. They said those were rich and there were lots of them. And up to the time my father died this year in June, the 25th, at 97 years and 10 months, he was still emphasising the importance of nonviolence, and smirking away that, of course, those who went to war to defeat the whites had really taken the country on a very long path, they could have done it another way."

Sekai Holland, herself a grandmother nearing her 70th birthday now, has known violence and the threat of violence for most of the last half-century.

It is how she has returned her fire with nonviolence that, Professor Rees says, led to the honour that brings her to Australia to deliver the Peace Prize lecture.

"I think (it's) the capacity for reconciliation and forgiveness (for) people who murdered hundreds, if not thousands, of her supporters -- and who tortured her -- so that, a bit like Archbishop Tutu's 'No future without forgiveness,' Sekai is big enough and bold enough and visionary enough to know that seeking revenge will produce only more violence and more rancour and that making peace with your enemy, if you like, is the way to go."

Sekai Holland left her native Zimbabwe, or then Rhodesia, for Australia in 1964 to pursue her education, and she quickly waded into the brewing fight over Aboriginal rights.

When she helped start the anti-apartheid movement in the country as well in the late '60s, she and Australian husband Jim Holland began getting death threats from nazi groups.

They went back to Africa in the '70s so she could help Robert Mugabe's liberation movement against Rhodesian white rule, and more death threats followed.

This time, she learned she had been sentenced to death after speaking out on the movement's violence against its recruits, on the sexual abuse of female recruits.

How serious was it?

Ms Holland fled back to Australia, only to watch one newspaper actually publish her obituary.

Her reaction almost 40 years later, full of mirth and laughter even as the danger continues, perhaps says as much about her life as anything can.

She still has the clipping.

"It had a photo. And people believed this story -- they weren't aware that I'd come back. And they printed a full story: 'Black Joan of Arc Murdered' was the headline. And, so, people came to pass their condolences to Jim, and I opened the door, and people ran away, thinking it was a ghost. This actually happened for a year. People ... the news travelled very slowly. There were no cellphones." (Laughter ...)

Sekai Holland was, in fact, just getting started.

The pair returned to Zimbabwe after independence in the 1980s, but she eventually fell out with Mr Mugabe and helped found the opposition Movement for Democratic Change.

In 2003, police chased her to their home, climbed the fence and tried to shoot her as she escaped into the house, then surrounded it, calling for her to come out.

Only a dinner engagement at the French embassy spared her, because, when she was late, a friend came looking, then quickly brought back the diplomats to break it up.

Finally, in 2007, Ms Holland was tortured in a Harare police station after being arrested with other leaders of the MDC.

She reportedly suffered 80 injuries, including a broken arm, a fractured knee and broken ribs, but Australian officials got her to the airport and on to South Africa, and she recovered.

How does such a woman then agree to be Co-Minister for National Healing, Reconciliation and Integration in a coalition government under Robert Mugabe two years later?

"It's an African saying that the honey that is the best to taste has bees that really bite -- badly! And so you know that, if we are going to have freedom, if we are really going to have a respect of the vote, we have to go through the paces. And they're not easy. I think it's one of the South Africans, the Boers, who said, 'In Africa, politics is not a game for sissies.' So, it's not a game for people who are lily-livered.* It's a game of people who are actually, the Africans would say, skop donnerers -- meaning people who are really tough. But toughness is not necessarily violence. It's actually standing your ground ... repeating your message ... however you're hit."

Sekai Holland is not easy to pin down when she talks of whether the 88-year-old President Mugabe can be part of the solution instead of the problem.

One time, she talks hopefully of his interest in protecting his legacy, but, another time, she merely trusts that what goes up must come down.

Regardless, her restraint after all these years and all that has happened astounds a friend and fellow protester from the early days.

Peter Murphy, who went on to become secretary of the Zimbabwe Information Centre in Sydney, started out on the anti-apartheid lines with her.

She may point back to her parents as her most important teachers, but he says time has taught her something very valuable, too.

"She's changed enormously, in the sense that she's got a sharp eye for what will bring people together. She's always looking for what will bring people together instead of what you do in your youth, which is much more to distinguish (between) the different people and criticise other groups and stuff like that. So, she's a very mature person, politically speaking, now, and she cuts through a lot of nonsense very fast. In fact, she's very intolerant of people wasting time with minor differences. And I think she's been a strategic thinker in these last, say, 15 years in Zimbabwe in a way she didn't have an opportunity to in the '70s in Australia."

After all these years, Peter Murphy finds Sekai Holland is unlike anybody else he has ever met.

He says, if pressed for a historical comparison, he would suggest the United States political activist who rose to fame in the 1960s, Angela Davis.

"She isn't so strong in her impact, you know, in her public discussion on whatever as Sekai is, but they're both women who've really ... you know, they're really in their late ... at the end of their lives, in a way, and they've spent their whole lives standing up for their principles and, really, in difficult campaigns."

Ms Holland, indeed, takes over a room when she enters, a mass of ornate headscarf, colourful wraparound print dress and looming physical presence.

In fact, Jim Holland, a slim man, relaxed and quiet in blue jeans and open-necked, short-sleeved shirt, could easily pass for the peace-prize winner of the two.

And as Sekai Holland wraps up an interview, she turns the conversation to all he has done for Zimbabwe.

It is ground-breaking work, from the country's water-and-sanitation system to its original Internet service to Internet work today with the country's youth.

All this, she jokes, from a couple that any visitor would think is breaking up an hour after meeting them.

"And, of course, the fight is because I don't understand engineers (and) Jim doesn't understand people like me, who act from what we feel. I don't understand people who act from what they think! So, our house is chaos."