When former Rhodes scholar Kumi Naidoo reflects on his years fighting the Apartheid regime in South Africa, the first thing that comes to mind is not the peril he faced or the discrimination he suffered, but the friendships he made in the process.
“The relationships you build up in that moment of major repression and trauma… sustain you”, he tells me. “Those of us who struggled gave up so much. But I always say to people: what we gain in terms of friendship, solidarity, a life of purpose, a life of meaning, all of these things are invaluable.” It’s a remarkable thing to say about a period of his life when he was wanted by the government.
Born in Durban in 1965, Naidoo was 15 years old when he first became a threat to the South African state after he began organising boycotts against the Apartheid system. A national student uprising had swept through the townships, driven by something simple and infuriating: the inequality in education. “One of the first slogans I heard as a 15-year-old was: ‘You pay our teachers peanuts, no wonder they give us monkey education.’”
The South African government, controlled by the white supremacist National Party during the Apartheid era, allocated vastly more to the education of white children than Black children. Teachers in the townships were underpaid and under-resourced. When students at his school in Durban stood up to say so, the state’s response was immediate and predictable. “Those of us who led the protests were expelled from school. In some funny way, that turned out to be a good thing because we were mainly being fed rote learning, memorising things. When we got expelled, we had to teach ourselves. Some progressive teachers came and helped us stay on top of our coursework.”
His mother had died by suicide that same year, as recounted in raw detail in his memoir Letters to My Mother: The Making of a Troublemaker. He had become politically aware before she died, he says, but her absence changed everything. Most of his friends who had been involved in the uprising were pulled back by their parents once things calmed down. He wasn’t. “In my case, I didn’t have the same family constraints. My mom was not there anymore to exercise caution. My relationship with my dad became strained after my mom passed. So I was able to do whatever I wanted to do. I didn’t have any restrictions on my time, on my movement, which, of course, all my friends had.”
He is quick to add that both parents had laid the groundwork for Naidoo’s activism, even if neither of them was explicitly political. His father was the informal auditor of half the community organisations in Durban, including Hindu associations, Muslim associations, and Christian churches. The headquarters for the local football and cricket associations was their home. Whenever young Kumi asked why Black children couldn’t use the same beaches or fairground rides as white children, the answer was always the same.
“Our parents would always say: ‘Oh no, no, you mustn’t ask questions like that. If you ask questions like that, you’ll end up in prison with Nelson Mandela.’” He laughs. “But I believe very strongly that my brother and I would not have contributed anything substantial to the liberation struggle were it not for the values our parents taught us.”
His mother, in particular, had given him something that transcended politics. “She said, the only religion you need is to see God in the eyes of every human being that you meet… Look for the weaknesses in yourself and the strengths in others, because maybe you can do something about the weakness in yourself, but you might not be able to do something about others.” He has carried that his entire life: “Now, as a holder of that wisdom, I take it and translate it to: ‘See God in every living thing, whether it be human beings or nature.’”
A few weeks after his mother’s death, a family friend sat him down. “My boy, I don’t know how you ever recover from something like this. But one thing I do know: however bad you’re feeling, however traumatised you’re feeling, there are people in our country, in our continent, and around the world who are in a much worse situation than you are. I would urge you not to feel sorry for yourself. Think about all that you have, and try to live your life with purpose, and work for the dignity of everybody.” The advice was transformative: “That’s basically how I’ve tried to live my life”, Naidoo says simply.
From the age of 15 to 18, while keeping on top of his coursework, Naidoo was on the run. He co-founded Helping Hands Youth Association, his local residents’ association, and then he joined Nelson Mandela’s underground movement. He recalls how all-consuming this work became: “Your life became almost full-time activism. And then you did what little you could to just make sure you passed your exams and got into the next year.”
In December 1986, the army came to his home, looking for Naidoo. He happened to be away in Cape Town at the time – being interviewed, of all things, for a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. He called home after learning he had made the shortlist. What his family told him stopped him cold. “They said: ‘Don’t come back home. The army was here last night.’” Despite being a wanted man, Naidoo was determined to continue his education. He recalls that there were police on every entrance to campus, so he disguised himself as a businessman and was driven onto campus by a white professor at whose house he had been hiding. “And so, I wrote my four exams at a sort of quote-unquote secret venue on campus.”
The Rhodes scholarship was Naidoo’s ticket out of the peril he now found himself in. At the interview, he was the only Black candidate among twelve finalists. When the only Black woman on the panel asked why so few applied, he had a direct answer: the application process itself was built for privilege. You needed a car. You needed money for petrol. You needed to travel to individual meetings with each of the nine panel members. “If you came from a working-class background, that was not something you could take for granted.”
Naidoo questioned whether it was right to take money from the endowment of Cecil John Rhodes, one of the architects of the very system that had forced him to leave South Africa. “I discussed it with my friends and comrades, and we landed on the point that, if I were to get the scholarship, Cecil John Rhodes would probably turn in his grave. And we were not going to lose any sleep from creating him discomfort.” He encourages Black students from poor backgrounds to apply to this day. “We should feel no embarrassment to access a scholarship that was the result of the exploitation of the people of southern Africa, especially if you’re going to use those skills for advancing the interests of the people, rather than just for the advancement of your self-interest.”
Arriving at Oxford to undertake a PhD in Political Sociology was a complete culture shock. The level of political consciousness was not what Naidoo had hoped it would be: “What I found difficult was the level of privilege at Oxford, and the kinds of assumptions that came with it.” But the hardest thing was the separation from his home. “My body was in Oxford. But my heart and soul were still in South Africa because my friends were being thrown in prison, being murdered. All the time while I was in Oxford.”
There is one story he tells that captures the dissonance perfectly. In South Africa, International Workers’ Day on 1st May is a significant, serious occasion: a day to remember the struggle of the working class. When he arrived at Oxford and heard students talking excitedly about May Day, he thought he had found his people.“I thought: ‘Oh, there’s hope, everybody’s concerned about the workers.’” A grin. “Only to discover that May Day was a unique Oxford festival. A pagan festival.”
Naidoo left Oxford before finishing his PhD in 1990, when the African National Congress (ANC) was unbanned, and negotiations about the end of Apartheid began. “Coming back was very easy. I was desperate to be back home to help. Especially after Mandela was released and all the liberation movements were legalised. There was a big kind of excitement: ‘Hey, let’s go home and contribute.’”
In 1994, when the first universal suffrage elections were held, Naidoo found himself thrust into the role of Director of Training for the Independent Electoral Commission, responsible for preparing thousands of electoral staff nationwide. “I’d never run a massive national election before. Neither had I even voted in an election. And suddenly I end up as director for training.”
The challenges were immense. Ballot papers didn’t reach remote rural areas on time. Results were delayed. There was public contestation about the count. At points, Naidoo was the person on television explaining the delays. But it was also joyous: “It was special being part of a very important historic process. To see the long lines, the patience that people had to go and vote. After almost two decades of struggle, to see democracy finally be born in South Africa, that was quite a special experience.”
He returned to Oxford in 1995 to finish the DPhil he had started in 1987. He is cheerfully unashamed about the timeline: “My biggest academic achievement: I took the longest to ever complete a PhD at Oxford. I started in 1987 and graduated in 2000.” He pauses, laughing. “Most people, if it takes that long, they give up.”
After Apartheid came to an end with the victory of the ANC in the 1994 elections, Naidoo would eventually find himself engaged in a new struggle: climate justice. He had spent a decade leading CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organisations, when Greenpeace came calling. His first instinct was to redirect them. “I basically said to them: ‘Hey, I know some good environmentalists.’”
When they persisted and asked him to meet, he agreed reluctantly. Then his daughter found out. “She said: ‘Dad, I won’t talk to you if you don’t seriously consider this Greenpeace position. Because Greenpeace is fighting for my future, and you need to do much more on climate change.’” He smiles. “I always attribute my embracing of environmental justice to the encouragement I got from my daughter.”
He brought to Greenpeace a critique that has come to define the rest of his career: “One of the biggest mistakes we made was that Western environmentalism framed climate change as an environmental issue, whereas climate change is a result of our economic system, our energy system, our food system, our transport system. To treat any of these issues in three different silos is exactly wrong.
“If you are a person of colour in the global North, most likely you’re living near a polluting facility. If you are white, you’re probably not facing the same challenges to air quality. Not only does linking these issues not dilute the environmental message, it actually makes climate justice much more real, pertinent, and brings it home to ordinary people. If you talk about climate only in degrees and parts per million, and you don’t connect it to air quality, to jobs, to local community, you will never move the large numbers of people you need to move.”
In June 2011, he spent four days in a Greenlandic prison after occupying a Gazprom oil platform in the Arctic. The drilling resumed soon after. He does not pretend otherwise. “Social change rarely happens in a straight line. Most actions do not achieve their immediate objective overnight. The anti-Apartheid struggle certainly did not.” What matters, he says, is cumulative pressure. “Sometimes the impact of an action is not measured in days or weeks but in whether it helps move society closer to a tipping point for change.”
The road has been bumpy. In 2015, he resigned from Greenpeace, a year after it emerged that a staffer had lost £3 million in donor funds on the foreign exchange market. His tenure as Secretary-General of Amnesty International was short-lived: he resigned, citing ill-health in 2019, not long after allegations of a toxic workplace culture, highlighted by a researcher’s suicide, led staff to petition for his removal. He speaks about both with the same equanimity he brings to everything. “When I was headhunted for both the Amnesty International and Greenpeace leadership roles, one of the key reasons I was approached was the recognition that both institutions were structurally racist and did not reflect the realities of the world as it actually is. A key part of my mandate was therefore to help rebalance power within these organisations.”
Transformation, he notes, creates losers as well as winners. “When institutions begin to shift power from Global North to Global South, some people inevitably lose privileged positions, influence, and status.” He does not say this unkindly. “But it becomes deeply problematic when organisations like Greenpeace and Amnesty call on the world to act urgently and justly, while failing to look anything like the 88% of the world’s population that lives in the Global South.”
So, is there a difference between being a great activist and being a great organisational leader? “They are definitely not the same thing. Activism often rewards disruption, urgency, moral clarity, challenging institutions from the outside. Organisational leadership requires patience, coalition-building, administration, compromise, sustaining complex systems over time. Some people are exceptional activists but not effective institutional leaders. Others are strong managers but struggle to inspire movements. I tried throughout my life to bridge those worlds, sometimes successfully and sometimes imperfectly. Ultimately, others will judge how well I did.”
He has also engaged with the World Economic Forum in Davos while publicly criticising it, a contradiction some find hard to swallow. He doesn’t. “I believe we must be able to engage critically without becoming captured. My criticism of Davos has always been that too many powerful actors speak about justice and sustainability while continuing to benefit from systems that produce inequality and ecological destruction. But refusing to enter those spaces at all can also become a form of self-isolation. If we only speak to people who already agree with us, we limit our ability to influence outcomes.”
His current focus is the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, which he now leads as President of the initiative. The logic, he says, is simple: “Imagine one day you’re rushing off to school, and when you come back, you notice there’s water seeping out of the bathroom. You open the door and realise you left the tap on. What do you do first? Do you turn off the tap, or do you start mopping the floor?” He lets that sit. “For 30 years, we’ve been mopping the floor. 86% of what drives climate change is our dependency on oil, coal, and gas. Unless we address the root cause, which is fossil fuels, we’re not actually addressing the climate struggle at all.”
The model is the 1997 landmine ban treaty: a coalition of ambitious countries negotiates outside the UN system, brings it to the General Assembly, and forces a vote. “By the time that happens, there will be very few countries putting up their hands saying: ‘Oh yes, we want fossil fuels, just as nobody put up their hands saying we want landmines.’”
He is not naive about the opposition. “The lobbying capability of the fossil fuel industry is not to be underestimated at all. They’ve got marketing and communications resources on a scale that you can only dream about.” But the public understanding has shifted, and that, he believes, is harder to reverse than a lobbying victory. “I don’t think it’s going to be as easy for them as they might be thinking because more and more people understand that the root cause of climate change is our dependence on oil and gas.”
Naidoo is 61 now. A member of the University of Oxford’s Equality and Diversity Unit and an honorary fellow of Magdalen College, he remains very much a part of the city that provided him sanctuary from the repression of Apartheid. The boy who dressed as a businessman to sit his university exams while the police searched for him has lived, by any measure, several full lives. The professor who drove him through those campus gates is part of a long chain of people who took a risk for him, and for whom he has, in turn, taken risks. “It’s much better to try and fail”, he says, repeating one of his mother’s wisdoms, “than to fail to try”.
