31 Facts About Kumi Naidoo

Kumi Naidoo was International Executive Director of Greenpeace International and Secretary General of Amnesty International.

Kumi Naidoo's activism went from neighbourhood organising and community youth work to civil disobedience with mass mobilisations against the white controlled apartheid government.

Kumi Naidoo is a co-founder of the Helping Hands Youth Organisation.

Kumi Naidoo has written about his activism in this period in his memoirs titled, Letters to My Mother: The Making of a Troublemaker.

Kumi Naidoo was arrested several times and was charged for violating provisions against mass mobilisation, civil disobedience and for violating the state of emergency.

Kumi Naidoo's work made him a target for the Security Police This led him to having to go underground before he was forced to flee into exile to the United Kingdom until 1990.

Kumi Naidoo suspended his studies at Oxford to return to 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.

Kumi Naidoo was later asked to lead the process to formally register the African National Congress as a political party.

Kumi Naidoo then served as the official spokesperson of the Independent Electoral Commission, the overseer of the country's first democratic elections in April 1994.

Kumi Naidoo was the founding member and executive director of the South African National NGO Coalition.

Kumi Naidoo, like many South African-born Indians, identifies himself as a Black South African.

Kumi Naidoo noted that the completion of his doctorate was absolutely essential given that he was told he was "the first Indian activist" from South Africa to earn a doctorate at Oxford.

Kumi Naidoo's doctorate was earned in the late 1990s, after he returned to England from South Africa.

Kumi Naidoo had been persuaded by his daughter Naomi to take on the role.

Kumi Naidoo saw his role as the executive director of Greenpeace as that of an alliance builder and an agent of change.

Importantly, Kumi Naidoo saw the intricate connections between environmental justice, women's and human rights as being interconnected, occasionally bringing him much criticism from Western-born environmentalists who tended and tend to see environmentalism as a discrete cause.

Kumi Naidoo has been actively involved in acts of peaceful civil-disobedience in the Arctic Ocean region against Shell and Gazprom's plan to drill in the Arctic's melting ice.

Kumi Naidoo was deported to Denmark where he spent a short time in Danish custody before being released in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Kumi Naidoo has been a vocal critic of the failure of bodies like the World Economic Forum, to go beyond "system recovery", "system protection and maintenance" instead proposing a system re-design.

Kumi Naidoo uses the WEF to amplify environmental messages to business leaders and politicians and lobby for green business practices and transformational changes in the energy sector.

Kumi Naidoo regularly attends United Nations climate negotiations and advocates for increased ambitions from governments to cap emissions and vigorously move towards an energy sector based on renewables meant to help humanity avoid catastrophic climate change.

In 2015 Kumi Naidoo announced that he would be leaving the post of International Executive Director in the middle of his second term.

Kumi Naidoo's resignation came shortly after it emerged that the organization suffers a budgetary crisis.

Greenpeace International staff shortly joined their colleagues demanding that Executive Director Kumi Naidoo should resign as well.

Kumi Naidoo started his role at Amnesty with an opening session from Africa.

On 5 December 2019 Kumi Naidoo resigned from Amnesty International citing ill health.

In May 2016, Kumi Naidoo became the Founding Chair of Africans Rising, a Pan-African movement of people and organisations, working for justice, peace and dignity.

Kumi Naidoo continues to serve Africans Rising in a non-executive role capacity with the official title of Global Ambassador.

In July 2021, Kumi Naidoo was awarded the prestigious Richard von Weizsacker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy, in Berlin.

Concurrently with the period spent in Berlin at the Robert Bosch Academy, Kumi Naidoo hosted a new podcast for the Green Economy Coalition, 'that tackles some of the biggest issues of our time.

In November 2022, Kumi Naidoo released the first instalment of his memoirs.