Kumi Naidoo

Kumi Naidoo
Kumi Naidoo at the World Economic Forum annual meeting in 2011

Kumi Naidoo (born 1965) is a South African human rights activist and previously the International Executive Director of international environmentalist group Greenpeace. He was the first African to head the organisation. After battling apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s and 1980s through the Helping Hands Youth Organisation, Naidoo led global campaigns to end poverty and protect human rights. He has served as the secretary-general of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty. He was Secretary General of Civicus, an international alliance for citizen participation, from 1998 to 2008. Recently, he has led the Global Call for Climate Action (Tcktcktck.org), which brings together environmental, aid, religious and human rights groups, labour unions, scientists and others and has organised mass demonstrations around climate negotiations.

Born in Durban, South Africa, Naidoo became involved in anti-apartheid activities when he was 15, resulting in his expulsion from high school. He was involved in neighbourhood organising, youth work in his community, and mass mobilisations against the apartheid regime. During the apartheid government, Naidoo was arrested several times and was charged for violating provisions against mass mobilisation, civil disobedience and for violating the state of emergency. This led him to having to go underground before finally deciding to live in exile in England. During this time he was a Rhodes scholar at the University of Oxford and he eventually earned a D.Phil in political sociology. Naidoo's doctorate, however, was earned in the late 1990s, after he returned to England from South Africa. He suspended his studies at Oxford to return to his native South Africa in 1990 in order to conduct literacy campaigns after the release of Nelson Mandela from prison and Mandela's decision to run for president of South Africa. Naidoo, like many South African-born Indians, identifies himself as a Black South African. He noted that the completion of his doctorate was absolutely essential given that he was told that he was "the first Black activist" from South Africa to earn a doctorate at Oxford.