Roads Less Travelled: Kumi Naidoo Podcast Transcript

Sophie Ryan:

Welcome to Roads Less Traveled. My name is Sophie Ryan and I'm an Australian Rhodes Scholar, currently studying in Oxford. In this series of conversations, I talk to some remarkable individuals, some from within the Rhodes community, some from beyond, about the roads less traveled they've taken in life, and some of the things they've learned along the way.

Kumi Naidoo:

The best advice I can give to young people and others around the world, who are feeling a sense of despondency about where we are and where humanity is, I would say firstly, pessimism is a luxury we simply cannot afford and the pessimism of our analysis, can best be overcome by the optimism of our creativity and actions that seek to resolve the injustices or problems that we face.

Sophie Ryan:

Today we're talking to Kumi Naidoo, who for more than 40 years now, has been a human rights and environmental activist. I don't want to go into too much detail before we jump into the conversation, but to give you a bit of a taste of Kumi's story, at 15, he was expelled from his Durban school for his Anti-Apartheid activism and his campaigning in the years after that, led to him being arrested and forced into exile in the UK, which is when he came to Oxford and earned his doctorate as a Rhodes Scholar.

After the fall of the apartheid regime. Kumi then went back to South Africa, to do important work for the new government and then from there, went on to hold a number of important leadership roles with social justice organizations worldwide, including Head of Greenpeace and Secretary General of Amnesty International. He has recently published, what I found to be an extremely moving memoir, called Letters to My Mother, the Making of a Troublemaker, which we will discuss in our conversation today. Kumi, hello and thank you so very much for joining us.

Kumi Naidoo:

Thank you so much Sophie, and thank you for having me and thank you for that very kind introduction. I'm sorry though, that I need to just correct one small, detail which is you said that while at Oxford I finished the PhD. The truth is, I was in my third year, when Nelson Mandela was released from prison in February and the moment that happened, two weeks later, I was back home, figured that I'd contribute to what was happening and I actually suspended...

There was a thing that you could do then at Oxford, I don't know whether you can still do that now, called lapsed status. I stopped the clock ticking on my... I suspended my studies and then came back almost a decade later and then finished it. I think I have a very embarrassing record at Oxford. I think I've probably taken the longest, to actually finish a PhD.

Sophie Ryan:

I don't think... That can't be true, but I

Kumi Naidoo:

Started in '87 and I graduated in 2000. That was quite a long time. Okay. I did a few things in between, but for the record, when I went for my graduation, the president of the college, was the same president when I arrived.

Sophie Ryan:

I see.

Kumi Naidoo:

I overlapped with him and it was quite strange, he was still there after 13 years.

Sophie Ryan:

Yeah, I bet that would've been quite odd. Well, Kumi with the caveats around your time in Oxford in place now, let's move to taking you on back to the beginning of your road, so to say. To kick us off in our conversation, I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about where you grew up and what your early childhood was like?

Kumi Naidoo:

I grew up in the city of Durban, in a township called Chatsworth and like all townships at that time, they were all racially designated and I grew up in an Indian township and quite early on, began to see the injustice of apartheid, because every time you took a bus into town, you would pass schools with four green sports fields, for example and your school didn't have even one sometimes.

The inequality became quite visible. I was quite curious and was reading a lot in the newspapers and I think the main thing was Steve Biko's murder in prison in 1977, began my first arousings, because there was lots about it in the newspaper. The inquest in his death and so on and that really moved me and then I started talking to progressive teachers and so on.

I was getting quite politically aware and already searching for how, I together with my friends, were part of the conversation, how we could organize ourselves to make a difference and then on the 10th of April 1980, disaster struck, when my mom took her life and this was two weeks before a national student uprising, against the inequality in the education system would explode and then two weeks after my mom's passing, was one of the student leaders in my school and in my community, that was thrown up as one of the leaders.

We were suspended from school, then reinstated and went back to school, but by then we were in our heads I think many of us, we are part of the struggle and we are going to make whatever contributions that we need to make, to end the system of apartheid. That is a choice in very many young people of my generation made across the country and we didn't understand much. We were kids.

The slogan at the front of the march, in my first demonstration was, we want equality. By the time the slogan got to the back of the march, the younger kids were chanting, we want a colour TV, we want a colour TV. We thought that was what the slogan at the front of the march was, but if I'm brutally honest, at that age, 15 years old, we probably wanted a colour TV and equality almost equally, and both would've seemed equally unattainable, at that point in one's life.

And the trauma of my mom's passing, was very difficult and in a way, the fact that the boycotts happened at that time and there were options for me to take all my energy, including pain, anger, everything into my activism, just meant that I became very committed and gave it my all and then the following year, got expelled from school and then self-taught myself with some support from textbooks and, teachers that took a chance to come to our houses to teach us and we wrote the exam that adults would drop out of school when they decide to come back, to finish the school leaving certificate.

We took that exam and I was lucky just to pass good enough to make it into university the next year and then all this time though, one is getting very actively involved in youth organization, civic organizations, as well as in the broad Anti-Apartheid movement and when I made it to university, it was very interesting. I didn't need university for my first activism, because I already had two and a half, three years of activism already, as a high school student.

When I got to campus, I didn't become heavily involved in the student movement. I participated more as a rank and file student, attended all the meetings and so on, but was always rushing home for that experience and to contribute to what was happening in the community where I lived. Anyway, maybe to fast-forward, we went through a period of lots of repression.

Many friends and comrades were killed, we were at funerals every other weekend and so on and eventually, my situation required that I needed to flee, but just before I fled, I got the Rhodes Scholarship and I had a fairly soft landing on the other side, compared to many of my comrades who had to jump over borders into neighbouring countries and then find the way and so on. Yeah, and then I guess that's where it started. I don't know, maybe I've gone too far already.

Sophie Ryan:

I'd love to actually unpack a couple of those things in a little bit more granular detail, Kumi, if that's all right. There's so much to unpack I suppose, but maybe to go back to your early years of activism in particular, with your work with Helping Hands, for instance, and the school boycotts. At that point in time, the consequences of getting involved with these movements, was that something that was on your mind in terms of, for instance, school expulsions and the prospect of whether you might go to university after that? I wondered if we could go back to Kumi at age 15 to 17, that period of time. How was it that you came to put your activism front and centre, as your number one priority then?

Kumi Naidoo:

Those two years were two of the most exhausting years in the sense of the mental exhaustion from the trauma of my mom's passing and trying to cope with that and then, literally the physical exhaustion from sleeping three, four hours, because one was trying to keep up with your schoolwork on the one end and then, you could be involved 24/7 because there was so much to do and so few people.

People always think that at all given moments in the struggle to end the apartheid regime, that there were large numbers of people engaged. When the depression hit, the numbers of people... We had to take into account the question of depression in that period. For example, our youth organization Helping Hands, the name Helping Hands was chosen. We could have called it Rise Up Against Injustice, but we called it Helping Hands quite consciously, to give it a soft name, so that we could say that we as young people, were coming together to keep young people off the streets by organizing education classes and sporting activities and on.

But of course, if we ran an athletic program while we were warming people down, at the end of the session, we would sit in a circle and then we would gently have conversations about what was happening in the country and try to educate people in a very stealthy way, if you want. That's what repression meant at that time and you had to be careful, because it was known that the government had spies in the every community, whose job it was to find out who the troublemakers were and so on and I was impressed with the parents around us, because we found the right balance by always doing good things in the community. We were adding value to community life by supporting the children's home, by supporting the home for people living with disabilities, by organizing extra education classes for kids that were struggling in subjects like maths or English literature and so on.

And so doing that, gave us credibility in the community and also, one of the biggest campaigns we waged, was when the bread price in 1982, shot up by quite a lot of money at that time and we mobilized the campaign, to appeal to the government to reduce the increase. We failed, we failed, but the fact that we did that, the parents in the community felt, "Well these kids are really caring for what's happening in the community," kind of thing.

We had some credibility by tactically choosing activities that would bring our parents closer to us, because right now the same challenge exists across the world. The intergenerational divide we see between young people understanding, for example, the urgency of climate, as well as understanding the urgency of fundamentally reconfiguring an economic system that is not working for people on the one hand and then you've got parents largely not aware of how bad the situation is, because they've got accustomed to doing things in a particular way for a very long time. That period anyway, was also a period of immense learning. We learned everything from how to chair a meeting, how to take minutes, how to prepare an audit for an annual general meeting, how to silkscreen t-shirts.

Sophie Ryan:

Could you tell us a little bit Kumi, about who was influencing you in this period? Who were you learning all of this from?

Kumi Naidoo:

We had activists in our community, who were older than us who were at university and there were four of them in particular, who really nurtured our development in quite important ways. There was Charm Govender and eventually, his wife Maggie and then there was another lawyer who had offices in the area where I lived and made it available for me to study, as well as to have meetings and so on, which was a huge privilege to have at that time and Shoots Naidoo, who was one of the most intellectually bright people I've met in my life and sadly, two of them are gone now, but what they taught us, and it's not to say that everything they taught us, we took on board, just as they taught it to us.

Some of the things and it was always my younger brother, who's a year younger than me, marching this journey with me and the intergenerational divides we have always, is that the older generation has a sense that based on their experience, there are certain ways of doing things and that's how we should do it and then the younger generation is looking at the older generation saying, "You are contaminated by bad experience, because if your experience was so great, why is there so much injustice, inequality, uncertainty in the world?"

Experience is not necessarily, genuinely respected by younger people at any moment in history, but certainly in this moment where we live now and I think there's a justification for that. My generation has to fess up that we have not provided the kind of leadership and we have brought us to a point of disaster on climate and on so many other things. We're not anywhere where we should be, but my ability to engage with these issues today, was very informed by what I learned in that two year period that you talked about. I also had lots of teachers, who used to gently educate us, pass us a leaflet here and there and so on and all of those things contributed to our learning.

Sophie Ryan:

I wonder if maybe we could talk about this idea that you're touching on also, with being handed a leaflet by the right person at the right time and the ideas that are sparked by moments like that. You write in the book, I think at the point where you were reflecting after the youth forum that you organized, you discussed there about all of the moments that had come together in shaping your Anti-Apartheid positions at that point and you wrote there, that we didn't just wake up one day with those views fully formed and we needed to accompany others on their own paths to political understanding and commitment.

One thing that I was thinking about after I read that, is that I actually think that for many young people today, and not just young people I don't think, but for many people today, the struggle is also with just coming up with where we stand on issues and what we think about social issues and what we think should be done about them, before we take the next step from there about how we actually take that stand and I wondered whether you have any thoughts from your experiences on how people can confront that challenge and how we should actually learn about social issues and then decide how we may personally make a useful contribution to the issues, that we think really matter.

Kumi Naidoo:

I think the biggest challenge we have in the world today, is not that those that exercise power unjustly or without creativity and leadership, because they deploy the repressive state apparatus, by which I mean the use of the army, the police, formal laws that repress and so on. Of course, all of these are very important things that constrain and shape the space for political life. No question about it, but what I'm going to say, might shock some people.

I don't think that's the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge, is in fact what has been called the ideological state apparatus, by which we mean the framework for education, the framework for religion, social norms and customs, the funding of arts and culture and critically important, the framework for communications and media. Now all of this shapes the mind of the average citizen and if you look at the United States as an example, you've got about 35% of the American people, who only watch Fox News and they believe every single word that comes out of Fox News.

And now it's just been made crystal clear what many have known, that Fox presenters and newscasters, knew that Trump was allegations that the elections were fraudulent and so on was untrue, but because it made good commercial sense and because the politics were perhaps aligned in that direction, they continued to do that. Now I say to friends in the United States, for example, you can't write off all the people that voted for Trump. You need to understand why they landed in that position, why their consciousness shifted in that way and figure out how you're going to win them back. In the apartheid context, SABC was the South African Broadcasting Corporation. We called it the South African Brainwashing Corporation. It was a very effective propaganda tool and our print media and radio was also controlled, meant that the government largely was shaping what you knew when you knew it and so on.

And a lot of it was either lies or certainly not telling you that which would've made a difference to your analysis. For example, most people would've grown up, including myself, with the image of Nelson Mandela as a brutal terrorist, who deserved to be in prison. That's how he was painted in the media. It was only in 1980, when I was 15, during the campaign for Equality in education, that we hear the name of Nelson Mandela, we start reading about him and some of us had heard our parents say things like, say if you went to the beach and we could not go to that beach or the games that were there only for white kids and if we ask our parents why is it they can go and we can't go, and our parents would say, "Don't ask questions like that, you'll end up on Robben Island with Nelson Mandela."

And that was the end of the conversation, but we didn't know much about him and then suddenly, when we discovered how many of our leaders were in prison, how long the struggle has been going on, how much of courage they had shown, all inspired us to rise to the challenge of trying to make a contribution and the truth is, most of us lived during that period with the sense that we won't make it, we won't make it to 20, but there was a passion, commitment and a sense of purpose, that gave us the courage to stand in front of what we used to call Casspirs, which were these army vehicles that were brought into the townships and that kind of thing and now that I think about it, it's quite extraordinary to think, at that age, the courage that we had, perhaps because we didn't fully understand the implications.

But the truth though is, we are carrying a major, major pain and a burden from that period. I think it is wrong to have done what we did, which is we underestimated what psychological impact, the trauma of living through all of that, would've had on us young people. The fact that just the transition, happened the way that it did, then the country continues to hold together even though we have major, major challenges and major, major setbacks, is a miracle in a way, given all the trauma that accumulated, but today when I look at South African Society, and I've said this publicly, it feels as if we all need mass healing and mass therapy, to help us cope with the scars that we carry, from that period of extreme depression under apartheid.

Sophie Ryan:

I can imagine. Let's go back to also in the thick of that period then, when you're going from high school to university, in that period where the fight was all consuming, and as you said, many of you not expecting to really make it past 21, that's how short term the vision was. Why did you go to university? On the education side, how did you go from that focus, to being in a position where you could apply for a Rhodes Scholarship and go to Oxford? And could you talk us through that side, I suppose of the story too, of how alongside these struggles and your all consuming activism at that time, what prompted you to go to university at all?

Kumi Naidoo:

Universities were seen as the natural site of struggle. That's where you went to sharpen your knowledge on theory of political resistance, all of that, and where you met other smart and cutting edge thinkers and so on, but interestingly for me, if I tell you what were the three things that I was considering and they were all about, which things could help make a more useful contribution to the struggle. I considered law, which I in the end ended up doing, because that was the thing that I could most easily get into with the grades that I had got in my final leaving certificate, but the reason for that was, many lawyers were in the struggle.

They could defend political detainees and so on. That would've been the reasoning for law. Then the other two things I considered, were social work and social work, because you go into communities, you learn good community organizing skills and so on and I thought, "Well, if I qualify as a social worker, this would get me at a very grassroots level in communities, helping to educate and mobilize people," and then the third option was the physical education teacher, because working with kids is another amazing way to actually counter the propaganda, that was coming from the state and so on.

The problem with that, was to be a physical education teacher, you had to qualify for swimming and I barely swam at that point. Yeah, very much going to university though, was a choice of how will that help us in the struggle kind of thing, but I did consider there were a few older comrades, who actually said, "Go and work, go and get a factory job and work for a year or so and that'll help you understand the reality of what it means to be in a working class job and what it means to for the majority of people in the world."

And to be honest, that was very tempting and I did explore a few options, but to be honest, here is where the memory of my mother still influenced the choices that I made and I knew for sure, my dad wanted me to go to university and whenever I thought about the option, "Well maybe I should just not go to university for a year," I think just knowing how passionate my mother was about us making to university, in honour of a memory, I just said, "Okay, university's the route." I don't regret it. It was very good learning, politically, socially, academically and yeah, I have fond memories, even though we had some really scary times.

Sophie Ryan:

Just on the point of also, the role your parents' ideas played in that, I know early in your memoir, you write about the tension between what your parents' dreams for you might have been and the waking up to the realization of what the realities of apartheid might call you to do and you write that for your parents, all they really wanted for you was to get a good education, find a well-paid job and move to a more affluent Indian suburb. How have you, in that period of time, I suppose and after, because I think this is something that a lot of peers struggle with, is just reconciling the image of what those who love you might want you to do and what you as an individual are called to do, if that might be something different.

Kumi Naidoo:

This is a difficult, but not particularly special challenge, all of us have. You know what I mean? Whether you choose to be an activist or not, often children want to make choices different from what their parents might have in mind for them. In my case, I was confronted with the reality, with my mom gone and being estranged from my dad for the first years after my mom passed, I wasn't under any parental pressure, in terms of what I chose to do. I was very lucky and I was also very grateful that my dad paid for my university fees, for the first three years, but I have to say that my dad, he wasn't encouraging us to be involved in the political struggle at all, but he never, on the other hand said, "If you don't stop your activism, I won't pay your fees," or anything of that sort.

He respected our choice. He would say things like, "Calm it down and try not to be so visible," and that kind of thing and during exam times he would say, "You should cool it down now and focus on your exams," and things like that, but I am grateful that... And a fair number of parents would've done the opposite and that's not because the parents didn't support the struggle, but they were just concerned about the implications for their children and then of course, the choices I made within what people in my family and friends and community would've generally thought would be reasonable, they thought I was very unreasonable.

The fact that people were saying, "You're sacrificing your education," and that time, the three main professions that were open to you, was Doctor, Lawyer, and Teacher. Those are the three things, your parents were very happy if you landed one of those, especially Doctor, Lawyer. In fact, Teacher was seen as not as good. It was a very small world, in terms of options, because apartheid constricted the options quite a lot, but people everywhere, what I find is people are resilient. People can rise above the circumstances, that society throws their way and now when I think back at some of the parents in our community, that were not so supportive of the boycotts and the other activities and so on, I am much more generous to them now than I was. I was at that age, understanding that they were trying to juggle very, very painful decisions and choices.

Sophie Ryan:

I wonder whether I could ask Kumi whether you think that in that period, if your mom hadn't have passed and that period of difficulty with your father as well, whether you would have thrown yourself as fully behind activism, as you did.

Kumi Naidoo:

We'll never know.

Sophie Ryan:

Exactly. Yeah, of course.

Kumi Naidoo:

We'll never know, but what I'll tell you, I can safely say, it would've been incredibly more difficult to do, because yeah, I started basically attending meetings and coming home whenever I wanted and so on and I wouldn't have been able to do that. I was very, very accountable to both my parents, right until the day my mom passed. I want to believe that I would've struggled to be involved and I would've fought to be involved, but I cannot say for sure. I cannot.

In all honesty, I cannot say for sure, because I loved my parents deeply and I would've wanted to please them. My thought processes were far broader, but even way before my mom takes her life, I'm already understanding a little of what's happening and I'm angry at what's happening and Steve Biko's passing, I was cutting snippets from the newspaper and pasting in the scrapbook on Steve Biko's inquest and that kind of thing. I was clearly on a journey before she passed. I hope, I want to believe, that I would've. I don't think it would've been as strong and as energized and as in your face activism that I was engaged in, in that period, actually in my life. That's my best guess.

Sophie Ryan:

And that makes sense. That makes sense, but hindsight, who knows.

Kumi Naidoo:

Who knows? My mom might have witnessed what the police were doing to kids and seeing kids landing up in hospital and so on and could herself become an activist, after what happened during the school boycotts. You never know.

Sophie Ryan:

Yeah, yeah. All right. Well, let's fast-forward now, through to what maybe we can talk about as the exile years, at the end of your undergraduate studies and before you were off to Oxford, could you tell us what that was like, when things were really starting to heat up with the police, how you dealt with that, what it was like to be in the thick of that?

Kumi Naidoo:

Now when I look back at it, I'm like, "How did we get through that?" But when you're in it, you're just in it. You know what I mean? You just go with the flow and the abnormal basically becomes normal, you know what I mean? Being on the run for almost a whole year, looking behind your back, living in different houses, sleeping on the beach sometime, all of these things, for almost a year, it became what was normal existence and now that I look back at it, some of the things that we managed to somehow do, how I managed to go for my Rhodes Scholar interview without getting caught, I don't know.

Sophie Ryan:

Yes.

Kumi Naidoo:

I was already out on bail, for violating the state of emergency regulations and then, I make the shortlist and I go to Cape Town for the interview and suddenly, I'm in the most luxurious place I'd ever been in my life, called the Mount Nelson Hotel. It's supposed to be apparently one of the 10 best hotels in the world, not in South Africa, in the world. You can imagine...

Sophie Ryan:

Wow. Quite the contrast.

Kumi Naidoo:

In fact, I encountered a bidet. I didn't know what it would do.

Sophie Ryan:

What do I do with this? Yeah.

Kumi Naidoo:

I look at this thing, what it is, I open the tap, the water shoots, hits the roof. Anyway, I more or less figured it out, by the time I left and for me by the way, making the shortlist for the scholarship, which meant I got a free trip to Cape Town, so I can connect with my comrades in Cape Town. That was enough. For me, I was happy to make the shortlist. I was the most relaxed candidate. Only thing that I was un-relaxed about, was the fact that what if somehow the police came in and bear in mind, I'm in an interview process, where it's 95% white people in it. I'm the only black candidate of the 12 people in the final shortlist. It was a very unfamiliar and uncomfortable environment in a way, even though people were trying hard to be welcoming and helping me fit in.

Yeah, and then immediately after I found out about, I got the scholarship and when I called home to tell my family, I get the news, "Don't come home. The army was here," and all of that and, "Stay in Cape Town," but I was not very disciplined. I didn't stay in Cape Town for long enough. I decided I needed to get back home. I was just worried about family and then I heard when the army came into the house, my little sister, who was about nine then, my father told her to pretend like she was sleeping and she did, but they used their rifles and picked up the blanket and so on and she was terrified with it and all of those stories, like I said, "Okay, I need to get back home." I made it back home and then get told that the army, the police, were at my office at the university.

I go underground and then the question was, do I write my exams, which were in January, February and then I make an elaborate arrangement to the university. They had some Professors there who set it up that the police were pitching up at the earlier announced venue where I was supposed to write the exam and I was writing it on a second venue on the exam and it was January in Durban, January, February, where it's boiling hot and to get through the police roadblocks, I had to go through a police roadblock for each of my four papers in a disguise.

I had a big beard and long hair, was generally how I looked in those days. A very prominent playwright, Ronnie Govender, was an activist, came and studied me in my hiding place and came up with an elaborate disguise for me to make it in and out of the exams, which was, he came up with this Lionel Richie lookalike. Basically, he takes me at five o'clock one morning into a studio, it was called Sensation and this poor woman who was cutting my hair, it was as if she was planting a bomb or doing something crazy dangerous, because her hands were shaking all the time.

But, she was very nice and gave me a perm, took off my beard, took off my moustache, but when I woke up and looked at myself in the mirror, I didn't even recognize that it was me. I looked so different. My aunts, my sister, and my girlfriend at the time when I walked up to them, I was almost in their face. They didn't recognize me, because I also put on those professorial glasses. Using that, I made it in and out of university, wrote my four papers and then...

Sophie Ryan:

That's amazing. Stuff of movies, I have to say, Kumi.

Kumi Naidoo:

I was still unhappy to be honest, about the idea of fleeing the country. I was like...

Sophie Ryan:

This is something that I really I wanted to ask you about, of how was that, to leave the country and I can imagine the wanting to be home and wanting to be with your people, at this point in time and then also, your role in the struggle against the apartheid regime as well. It must have been incredibly difficult to leave.

Kumi Naidoo:

Yeah, no it was. I think I never was sure whether I was doing the right thing and even today when I look back, I don't know whether I did the right thing for sure and in the end, I think it was the words of Billy Nair, somebody who'd spent 20 years in Robben Island Prison and he was in hiding as well, while I was and thankfully I was able to, through networks, get to his hiding place and I spent an hour and a bit with him and he basically said, "Listen, get out. What's the point? You're going to get arrested anyway or worse." Get out and go get some skills, educate yourself. We're going to need people who are educated when the transition happens," and he by the way, even though things were really bad in the country at that time, state of emergency, thousands of people in prison and so on, he was like, "Change is coming, don't worry, change is coming."

And I'm like, "I so hope you're right," and he knew something obviously, that we didn't know, in terms of how the power balance between that party state and the resistance was playing itself out and that's one thing and the second thing was, many people said, "Listen, what's the point of you getting killed or being thrown in prison and so on? Try to get out and at least use your voice when you're outside as well, against the regime." Those are the two things in the end, I said, "Okay," and then also, there were some close friends of mine that were on trial for very serious charges and the message I had gotten from one of them was, "Get out of the country. They have enough on you to put you away for a long time, so get out and also by you getting out, you won't compromise our trials," because none of us in those days could make a declaration that, I will withstand torture at any cost.

But so long as I was there, I could have compromised some of the people's trials that were going on and made it worse. It was also just getting out safely, would make it safer for some of the people that were already in prison. All of those reasons helped me make the decision, but I'd be lying to you if I didn't say that the culture shock that hit me when I got to the UK, was humongous. For the first six months, I really was so homesick and I think I was pretty much homesick for most of the time that I was there, because while I was there, my best friend Lenny Naidoo gets murdered and I get that news, then my brother ends up in prison around the same time and is in prison for at least half my time at Oxford and then every other week, somebody I knew or knew of, was being murdered by the regime and so on.

Being out was difficult and so in that sense, my Oxford years were not for many students, really enjoyable years and discovering new things and so on, but I did make some very important friendships, learned a lot of important things about myself, about my country. Looking at it from a distance, people underestimate sometimes, the power of just stepping away from the space that you normally reside in and having the luxury to just look back at it from a distance and you see things that when you're in it, you just don't see. While it was challenging at times, I made the most of it obviously, and I learned and made good friends and some of those friendships endure until today, and some of them intersect with my activism and work, which I also value a lot.

Sophie Ryan:

And fast-forward to early 1990s and Nelson Mandela's just been released, straight back to South Africa then?

Kumi Naidoo:

Yeah, pretty much within a month via Lusaka. I flew via Zambia. Wasn't sure whether... Because when I fled, there were charges against me. When I landed, I didn't know whether I would get arrested at the airport. The Lawyer said they were 50/50 on it, but they said even if I got arrested... I didn't come alone. I traveled back with a friend of mine, Satish Keisha, who sadly is not with us any longer and if I got arrested, somebody would know that I got arrested and then, made it to Durban and they didn't proceed at all with the charges against me and everything soon became partly normal, even though the repression and the power still was with the party state, at least for another four years, until the elections were held.

Sophie Ryan:

Let's pivot to another aspect of your career I'm really interested in Kumi, which is the work that you've done after the fall of the apartheid regime and in particular, some of your global civil society work, with organizations like Greenpeace. You joined Greenpeace in 2009 and you have said that you were attracted to Greenpeace's commitment to direct action and civil disobedience, which I think having discussed your background checks out, what was your role with Greenpeace and what was it like working with Greenpeace?

Kumi Naidoo:

I think you framed it well. What was my role initially in global civil society? I think it's important to note that global civil society is also an expression of all the power differentials, the inequalities and the dysfunctionalities that we see in global society, in the sense that Greenpeace for example, is more than 50 years old and I served Greenpeace for six years and up to today, I'm the only person in the global south, in all of that period, who was the head of Greenpeace.

If you look at the institutions, because they were formed mainly in the global north, they still have a character that reflects that reality to a large extent, even though they've made efforts and my being invited into that space, was to help with that journey of dealing with some of the internal shortcomings of the organizations, because the problem is, we have to create movements right now, that look like how the world looks like and if you have organization, institutions that largely represent one part of the world, then that does not set the right example and so on, but with Greenpeace, my attraction was very much that the climate crisis was getting more and more serious. To be honest, I did not understand it in the detail that I understand it today, when I engaged it, but I'm very grateful for the learning and the knowledge that I got from that experience.

But in terms of civil disobedience, it wasn't expected of me as the head of Greenpeace to engage in civil disobedience, but I did once in Greenland, when I saw 22 young activists spend about two weeks in prison, after peaceful action to try to stop drilling in the Arctic and I went and followed them, especially after the company in question had got a judgment saying that if we did any action, they could automatically fine us. We raised the money for the fine and then we went and did the action anyway and made the point that... Because a lot of the power in those situations, is more with the companies, right? Because they've got huge budgets and lawyers and so on. As somebody who doesn't swim very well, it was a bit...

Sophie Ryan:

I can imagine. That would've been quite daunting, scaling an oil platform.

Kumi Naidoo:

But I was glad to have the opportunity to contribute in that way and to send the signal, that the lives of volunteers and frontline activists is no less important than the lives of somebody who is in the title of Executive Director or CEO, whatever. Obviously, my role meant I couldn't be doing that every day of the week, but doing it once there and once in Russia, the following year, where we occupied the gas from oil rig called [inaudible 00:50:03] Sea and in that case, I did that, was because I was anxious about the response of Russia.

I had gone to Russia, met with four ministers, from there, flew to Norway, jumped on the ship and went, so that I thought my being there would... And it did. A navy was there, the Navy saw we were peaceful, they didn't intervene, but the following year when the judgment was made, it was not necessary for me to go, because the previous year it went well and we were going to do largely the same action. In the end, things turned out really differently. Our activists ended up in prison three months, there were on stage facing piracy charges.

Sophie Ryan:

This is the Arctic Sunrise, wasn't it? Yes. Yes. Okay.

Kumi Naidoo:

I think we are at a point now, where we must recognize that humanity is in the most consequential decade in its history. What choices we make in the next 10 years, will determine what kind of future we'll have or whether our kids will have a future at all and it's within that context. I have a very strong sense, that we don't have any luxury to be precious about our legacies and about which organizations we work for. Right now, the choice is we need organizations to be as equitable as the struggles that we are fighting, as global as the struggles that we are fighting and as just as the struggles that we are fighting and to make sure that if we are not able to deliver what is needed for the seismic, structural, and systemic change that we need to see in the world, then we must make space for others to actually emerge.

And I'm not precious about any particular period in my life. Right now, all we need to be asking, is what do we need to do and what do we need to do differently, that gives humanity a chance to avert the climate crisis, because basically, humanity is sleepwalking into a crisis of epic proportions and we've been doing it now for a couple of decades, and right now, nobody can say we didn't know. The science is clear, extreme weather events are speaking to us clear and don't think that the kinds of conflicts that we are seeing, the migration crisis and all we are seeing, is unrelated from the climate crisis. Climate crisis today, is the center of many of the challenges that we are seeing, even though its hand might not be as visible, as some might need it to be or want it to be.

Sophie Ryan:

Kumi, noting the urgency and gravity of these demands that are on all of us individually, but then also collectively moving forward, how do you manage that, alongside looking after yourself and ensuring that you can get the most value out of your incapacity, to affect change?

Kumi Naidoo:

Yeah, this is a critically important question and I would say upfront, I'm probably the worst person, to give you a good answer on it.

Sophie Ryan:

That's why I want to ask.

Kumi Naidoo:

Yeah, yeah, because I'm not used to this challenge of balancing what people call work life balance and so on. Though I am in a different moment in my life right now, where I am not looking at only for myself, but looking at what I'm seeing for young people and others around me and very much feel that participation in public life, for a positive public purpose, is many things today. It's not only about putting pressure on those who have power in business and government, to do the right thing and deliver just outcomes, but it's also critically important for our mental health.

If we don't find creative, artistic, life loving ways, in which people can come together to try to hold back the crisis or to resolve it or push us in a positive direction, that participation itself is going to be an antidote to pessimism and an antidote to depression and so on and the worst thing we could have right now, is where people just withdraw into very individualistic lives, don't engage in community structures and so on. People are going to need community to be able to cope with what's ahead of us and things are going to get worse.

Let's hope things will get worse before they get better. That's what we are fighting for, but let's be clear, the amount of damage we've done already, we are seeing the extreme weather events and they're going to be with us for some time to come and it's still a big question, whether humanity will mobilize the kind of courage that we need, to make the big changes that we need to make, to secure our children and their children's future and just to say, the planet does not need saving. This is not about saving the planet.

This is about ensuring that humanity can coexist with nature, for centuries and centuries to come. If we continue on the part that we are, we will be gone, the planet will still be here and truth be said, once we become extinct as a species, the forest will recover, the oceans [inaudible 00:55:28]. Don't worry about saving the planet. Understand the struggle that we are engaged in, is to secure our children and their children's futures and given what a big stake and what a high stake there is, let's hope we can mobilize the moral courage, to make some comfortable and some uncomfortable changes, to ensure that we can secure our children's futures.

Sophie Ryan:

I agree completely. Let's turn now Kumi, to some rapid fire questions, to tie off our conversation for today. Feel free to answer with just the first thing that comes to mind. The first question for you, is something interesting that you might have learned about yourself or more generally in the past year?

Kumi Naidoo:

In the past year, I've learned that I am significantly more emotionally vulnerable than I thought I was and I've also learned that as a result of that, I've learned that I am more resilient than I thought I had.

Sophie Ryan:

Powerful stuff. I wondered what in your mind Kumi, might be the most radical act of civil disobedience that you've engaged in.

Kumi Naidoo:

I think at the age of 15, leading these two high school pupils from my high school into the street, even though we had been made aware that doing that could invite police gunfire and I think even though I've done things like occupying oil rigs and so on, which might sound more bold and so on, because of the age I was when I did it, I think that was the most memorable and most scary.

Sophie Ryan:

One person Kumi, that you would love to have a meal with, alive or dead.

Kumi Naidoo:

Well, most people won't know this person. His name is Sixto Rodriguez. Sixto Rodriguez was a musician and worker in Illinois. He made an album, which made it to South Africa and became a big hit in South Africa, but didn't go anywhere in the US and then decades later, some of his fans in South Africa tried to find him. There's a documentary done about it called Looking for Sugar Man and he comes as a laborer. He was working all his life. He made this thing, it became very popular. He sold more records in South Africa than Elvis Presley sold.

Sophie Ryan:

Wow.

Kumi Naidoo:

And his music also appealed to white liberals and liberal South Africans more generally, at that time and any case, he gets discovered, he comes to South Africa, he thinks he's going to perform for 20 people. Every concert he does is 10,000 strong. I eventually managed to get into a concert, to watch him from a distance and his music is amazing. His lyrics were better than Bob Dylan's. If he was a white man at that time, he would've been a mega star, but what impresses me most, is then he became super rich and was traveling the world and all of that, but he continued to live the simple humble lifestyle, that he lived throughout his life and he never let wealth change his values and so on. I would love to have...

Sophie Ryan:

A meal with him.

Kumi Naidoo:

Yeah.

Sophie Ryan:

If you could change one thing about the world tomorrow Kumi, what would that be?

Kumi Naidoo:

It would be gender equality.

Sophie Ryan:

Okay.

Kumi Naidoo:

I would try to ensure that we have 100% gender equality, because I think all our problems, including the climate problem, including inequality, comes from humanity depriving itself of the wisdom, participation, creativity, and knowledge, of more than half the population of the world, in most countries around the world.

Sophie Ryan:

And one final question for you Kumi, is the best or most useful advice that you can pay forward right now?

Kumi Naidoo:

The best advice I can give to young people and others around the world, who are feeling a sense of despondency about where we are and where humanity is, I would say firstly, pessimism is a luxury we simply cannot afford and the pessimism of our analysis, can best be overcome by the optimism of our creativity and actions, that seek to resolve the injustices or problems that we face and not to accept that what is in front of us and the life that humanity has created for us, that we've created for ourselves, is the best that humanity can create. Don't accept that and really push for always moving humanity, to a greater sense of justice, a greater sense of equity, a greater sense of sustainability and that's not a bad way to spend one's life.

Sophie Ryan:

What a perfect note to end the conversation on, Kumi. Thank you so very much for your time and for sharing all of your wisdom with us.

Kumi Naidoo:

Thank you so much for having me, and I hope your listeners find it useful.