Kumi Naidoo is one of the most powerful voices for climate justice and human rights. We were honored to welcome him to the screening of Wild Coast Warriors at this year’s Doxumentale. In our conversation, he reflected on why storytelling isn’t a luxury, but a lifeline in the climate struggle — and how movements like the Amapondo show us what courage, community, and resistance truly mean.
Kumi Naidoo is the President of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative and a leading figure in the newly founded Global Artivism Movement, which brings together arts, culture, and activism. A South African human rights and environmental activist, he previously served as Secretary General of Amnesty International and Executive Director of Greenpeace from 2009 to 2015. With decades of experience at the intersection of justice, ecology, and resistance, he is one of the most influential voices in the global climate justice movement.
We were honored to welcome him to a screening of Wild Coast Warriors. Before the film and the subsequent Q&A, we had the chance to sit down for an intimate conversation with him.
Kumi Naidoo: The story of the Wild Coast Warriors is a very inspirational story for South Africa, Africa, and the world. It shows that even when you have a very powerful, powerful corporate entity standing against you, that if people are united, people are well organized, you can actually prevail.
The people in the community that was affected — there were people that were killed, there were people that faced torture, violence of various kinds — but they still persevered and they still stand strong.
Movies and documentaries and music and theater and so on have a better ability to tell the stories of the suffering that people are engaged in — in a way that does not just give people the facts and does not aim to reach people at the head. It seeks to reach people in their hearts, bodies, and souls, and to move them into sensitivity and to move them to want to do something to actually address a particular injustice.
Storytelling is what's been neglected in our activism. By the way, when I was the head of Greenpeace International, we changed the title of Director of Communications to Director of Storytelling. But still, most of our mainstream organizations have a lot more work to do to fully embrace the power of arts and culture.
Let me conclude by saying: harnessing the power of arts and culture alone will not deliver salvation from the climate crisis and the intersecting crisis. However, failing to harness the power of arts and culture almost guarantees that we will lose.
Environmental human rights defenders are in fact human rights defenders. Because when we talk about what do environmental defenders defend — they defend water, they defend land, they defend livelihoods, they defend natural assets that people have.
And the sad reality is that every week right now, according to Global Witness, four environmental activists get killed somewhere in the world. Just think about that. Every week — four environmental activists get killed. Ten, fifteen years ago, it was about two per week that were being killed. So you can see that as we get deeper and deeper into the climate crisis, as the resources shrink, things are getting much more urgent.
Those with power and those who are wanting to make profit are becoming more desperate, more violent, more brutal and more inhumane. And that inhumanity can only be responded to with love, with courage, with purpose, and with clarity — of putting our children and their children's future first.
Let’s be very clear: the struggle to avert catastrophic climate change is not about saving the planet. The planet does not need saving. What do I mean by that? If we continue on this path that we are on — destroying our water resources, destroying our soil, warming up the planet — the end result is we will not be able to produce food. And the end result of that is that we will be gone. The planet will still be here.
So the good news for everybody who is concerned about saving the planet is: once we become extinct as a species, the oceans will recover, the forests will grow back, and so on.
So we need to understand that the struggle to avert catastrophic, runaway, irreversible climate change is nothing more and nothing less than protecting our children and their children's futures.
If we look at history and how history has been written — by dominant nations of the world, usually in the Global North — by the way, the populations of the Global North, the rich developed countries in the world, you’ll be surprised to know they only constitute 12% of the world’s population. 88% of the world’s population lives in what we call the Global South.
If we look at the struggle of the Amapondp people — they were able to resist, and they used indigenous knowledge, ancient wisdom, and so on.
What I like to say to people is: assuming we don't address climate change, and the last people left on the world get together and say, “Well, before we die, let's make a capsule and put in that capsule the story of the world, the story of humanity, so that if human life emerges again, humanity won't make the same mistakes” — one of the things we would put in that capsule is that the people who were called civilized by colonialism, and those that were called uncivilized, it should have been the opposite.
The civilized peoples in the world are those that understood that for humanity to prosper on the planet, we need to live in a mutually interdependent relationship with nature. That we need to see nature as part of us, not separate from us. That nature should not be dominated but should be taken care of.
Because if we don't do those things, we are destroying water that humanity needs.
And as indigenous peoples around the world have said almost a century ago: ‘When the last fish has been caught, when the last river has been polluted, when the last tree has been cut, it seems it’s only then that humanity will realize that we cannot eat money.’
Fossil fuels — oil, coal, and gas — which is 86% of the driver of climate change — oil, for example, has been what lots of wars have been fought about in the past and even now in the present. And in the future, wars are going to be fought about water much, much more — because that is something that humanity needs for its existence.
And throughout the world right now, indigenous peoples from Africa to Latin America to Asia — indigenous communities are the ones that are showing the way. And let’s be very clear: the biodiversity that exists, even though indigenous peoples were genocided, were wiped out, it’s amazing that those that have survived have been so resilient, so courageous, so inspirational. And we would be well served if we looked to those bodies of knowledge, rather than the bodies of knowledge that came from exploitation, extraction, and putting profit before people’s interest.
Firstly, right now, international solidarity is critically important.
The reality is, climate injustice and climate change is a challenge that doesn’t respect any national boundaries.
If there is one country that does everything right on climate change — has no emissions, no fossil fuel extraction, and so on — they can do everything right, but they will suffer. The African continent at the moment is paying the first and most brutal price for the impacts of climate change — but when we look at Africa as a continent, we have contributed the least to the problem.
We need people in powerful countries, where many of the global corporations are located that are engaged in these exploitative behaviors, to come under pressure — from the people in their own countries, from public opinion in their own countries — so that they will not do the crimes that they do far away. Many of these companies behave very respectfully in the Netherlands, in the UK, in the US, and so on. They respect things a bit more — not fully, but a bit more. But far away, they behave in the worst way.
If you take the Ogoni people in Nigeria — how they were murdered, how their leadership was murdered, the exploitation that was done — and then you ask yourself the question: why did we even get the story to be told around the world?
It was because there were court cases brought by citizens in the Netherlands and elsewhere that put pressure on Shell. And in the end, some judgments were given against Shell and other companies. But the sad truth is: Shell is still drilling in the Niger Delta, still behaving in the same manner, and so on. So people need to think about a menu for solidarity: Awareness. Putting pressure on the companies. Encouraging the stakeholders of those companies to put pressure on the management to change.
But it’s also about: if there are products coming from those places where exploitation has happened — even like in Europe, when trees are chopped in the Amazon and they make furniture and bring it here — we have said: “Don’t buy that.”
So use your purchasing power as well to express solidarity. Buy directly through fair trade practices from the people that produce it and cut out the exploiters that are in the supply chain before a product gets to you.
Use your purchasing power. Use your voice. Use your access to international institutions like the World Bank and the UN, to stand with the people that are most affected.
It is extraordinary that we have been negotiating for 30 years to get a climate agreement.
And even though 86% of the cause of climate change is our addiction to — and the burning of — oil, coal, and gas, it took 28 years of climate negotiations at the so-called COP — which stands for the Conference of the Parties, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change — it took 28 years for the term fossil fuels to even be mentioned.
That is as crazy as Alcoholics Anonymous holding 28 years of conferences and it takes them 28 years before they get the courage in one of the outcome documents to mention the word alcohol.
And the reason for that — if I stay with the Alcoholics Anonymous analogy — is that the largest delegation every year when governments meet at these so-called COPs is not the UK, not the US, not the EU — but the fossil fuel lobbyists.
And so today we need to recognize that the fossil fuel leadership holds the same place in society as slave owners did in a different era.
They are the new slave owners of today.
