Two environmental activists, born in remote farm villages along the Wild Coast, have been honoured with a global environmental award for their role in halting seismic blasting tests by the Shell oil and gas multinational off the Eastern Cape coastline.

Sinegugu Zukulu and Nonhle Mbuthuma - who were both vilified as being "anti-development" and threatened with assassination during separate campaigns to prevent titanium dune mining along the same stretch of coastline - have been named joint winners of the 35th Goldman Environmental Prize for the Africa region.

Zukulu, 54, is a veteran ecotourism campaigner and former geography teacher at Kearsney College near Durban, while Mbuthuma, 46, is the co-founder and spokesperson for the Amadiba Crisis Committee, a community-based movement opposed to dune mining and other megaprojects along the northern section of the Wild Coast.

The Goldman Awards honour the achievements and leadership of grassroots environmental activists across the world.

Previous winners include Ken Saro-Wiwa, the Nigerian writer and activist hanged by the military government in 1995 for his campaigns against crude oil drilling in the Niger Delta; the late Kenyan "Green Belt" activist Wangari Maathai who went on to become the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize; and Berta Cáceres, the Honduran activist murdered in 2016, just a year after receiving the Goldman Prize.

Earlier today Zukulu and Mbuthuma received their prizes at a ceremony at the San Fransisco Opera House during which...