Climate Reframe: Amplifying BAME Voices in the UK Environmental Movement

Kumi Naidoo

Activists & Campaigners
Also working within:
Charities & Philanthropists
Decolonising Movements & Diasporas
Also working within:
Charities & Philanthropists
Decolonising Movements & Diasporas
Based: UK / South Africa
Organisation: Activist
Kumi Naidoo is a Black South African human rights activist of Indian descent who was the Secretary-General of Amnesty International until December 2019. Naidoo was also the first African head of Greenpeace. At 15, he organised school boycotts against the apartheid educational system in South Africa and was eventually forced into exile in the United Kingdom until 1990. Naidoo returned to South Africa and was asked to lead the process to formally register the African National Congress as a political party. Kumi then served as the official spokesperson of the Independent Electoral Commission, the overseer of the country’s first democratic elections in April 1994. He is a senior advisor for the Community Arts Network and a special advisor to the Green Economy Coalition. He is professor of practice, Thunderbird School of Global Management at Arizona State University, and continues to serve as a global ambassador, Africans Rising for Justice, Peace and Dignity. Naidoo is a visiting fellow, Oxford University, and honorary fellow, Magdalen College. He is currently setting up the Riky Rick Foundation for the Promotion of Artvism in honour of his late son and rapper Riky Rick.
“A movement only becomes a movement of substance, size, and power when the artists say ‘we want to add our voice’.”