Kumi Naido/Photo: AfricaNewsAnalysis/Sandra Prufer
Bonn, 18.09.26
Kumi Naidoo is a prominent South African human rights and environmental justice activist who serves as the President of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. He served as Executive Director of Green Peace from 2009 to 2015, becoming the first person from the Global South to lead the organization.
He recently spoke in an exclusive interview with Sandra Prufer, AfricaNewsAnalysis’ Bonn Correspondent, during his visit to Bonn to attend the BONN SUMMIT which brings together stakeholders from the fields of art, culture, science, politics, and society to discuss the pressing challenges of our time and their cultural dimensions. The inaugural 2026 edition focuses on the relationship between culture and politics amidst shifting geopolitical power dynamics. We examine current developments in the USA and consider their implications for Europe. We shed light on specific arenas where culturally coded conflicts over values and worldviews play out. We invite you to join a shared dialogue on future scenarios, courses of action, and strategies for shaping the future.
Excerpts:
AfricaNewsAnalysis (ANA)/Sandra Prufer: You delivered a well-received keynote speech on the way forward in activism and the global climate justice movement, but also followed the whole 3-day conference, exploring the nexus of culture, democracy and global citizenship. What are your takeaways from it?
Kumi Naidoo: On the positive side, the summit confirmed something that more and more people are realizing: We cannot shift people on the numbers and the scale needed by doing activism as usual, by publishing policy documents, long books and complicated concepts and speaking in acronyms. Especially in the climate movement, we are the worst because we are constantly drowning people in an acronym alphabet soup, talking in scientific language that sometimes we don’t even ourselves fully understand, and we expect the rest of the world to understand. This is a big takeaway from here for me as somebody who’s been pushing to address the communications deficit of our activism generally and climate activism specifically. I take a little comfort from the fact that more people are now saying the things that were being said by a few people since a couple years ago.
ANA: How did your perspective as a civil society leader from South Africa differ from that of mostly European participants at the summit?
Kumi Naidoo: The challenge for our brothers and sisters in the Global North, in privileged countries like Germany, is not to imagine that your situation is anywhere close to as bad as it is for most people who live in the Global South. Yes, the AfD (German far-right party ‘Alternative for Germany’) poses a threat to democracy, the rule of law and artistic freedom, all those kinds of things, and I don’t want to undermine it. That’s serious. My question is: How can we be the best versions of ourselves, whether we live in Africa or in Europe, when we see the current moment for what it is? It’s terrifying and frightening on the one hand, but it’s also a moment which we’ve never had before in a positive sense.
What I mean by this: I don’t remember any moment in the history of my almost 50 years of activism where the appetite for big structural and systemic change is as high as it’s right now. That doesn’t mean that most people want structural systemic change, but that number is growing. We can’t continue incremental tinkering and rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic while humanity sinks, which is what we have been doing all these years. We need to fundamentally look at what kind of economic system we need to serve most people within planetary boundaries.
ANA: What are your thoughts on the state of democracy and your snapshot of the summit’s atmosphere? (See recently published report The Global State of Democracy 2026: Democracy in an Age of Conflict | International IDEA).
Kumi Naidoo: It appears that democracy has been reduced to the act of voting. If you just have elections, then you’re a democracy, even if those elections are bought and sold, for example in Russia by a state-controlled media. In the United States, you have right-wing dominated media as well as individual oligarchs that can buy the elections, like Elon Musk and other IT billionaires. The democracy that has been sold to us in the Global South for years is a democracy where the powerful can buy elections, where the media environment is distorted against the working class and trade unions and people that really represent the ordinary people. We need those folks in the Global North on our side, in places like Germany, to make sure that they don’t allow the current moment to make them feel despondent. We must be stronger, more resistant and creative together. Those are my two main takeaways from the summit.
It’s good to see that this sentiment is rising. However, it is also a concern for me that people feel so down here in Bonn. It’s a bit ironic that I have been living in the misery, the history and ongoing reality of extractivism, of social and environmental exploitation that Europe and the rest of the Global North did against Africa, we’re still going through it, and when I come to these global conferences the organizers will often ask me: “Please motivate the folks, please be optimistic.” I can do that in good faith because now I think it’s necessary for our shared humanity.
ANA: What we’re facing as humanity is called a polycrisis in the scientific and UN language. It’s a situation where multiple crises happen at once and reinforce one another, not only the triple planetary crisis of climate change, loss of biodiversity, and pollution, but also growing social inequalities, armed conflicts and geopolitical tensions. Everyone at the Bonn Summit seems to agree that arts and culture are needed more than ever as a social fabric of society, a vital democratic infrastructure and soft power. Yet, we see massive increases in military spending and funding cuts in education, social services, international development, culture and environmental issues. How do you explain this?
Kumi Naidoo: I am aligned to all the observations that you made. These global trends and policy shifts are happening. Firstly, we need to turbocharge intersectionality in our thinking. We’ve operated in silos and in artificially created boundaries between this is health, this is development, this is youth, this is climate, this is human rights. We need to understand that all these things are connected. The intersectionality that we need is not only about content areas, but also about how we intersect different parts of our toolbox of social change and activism. It’s been a mistake, a big grievous error that we have not created more space for arts and culture especially. I’m not only talking about museums and cultural institutions that are important. I am particularly concerned about artists who are up and coming, emerging artists who are on the front lines of the climate crisis. How can we use their voices and creativity to amplify what’s happening?
ANA: You are the co-founder of the Global Artivism Network, a movement led by the Global South that harnesses the power of arts and culture to drive social transformation. How does it help to raise the voices and visibility of young artists from the global majority?
Kumi Naidoo: The Global Activism Network has been calling since 2022 on international foundations and the philanthropic community to fund more generously in the arts and culture space. This fall, we are organizing a global artivism month, which is a little bit more of a month, starting on November 1st on the road to the COP31 Climate Conference in Antalya and running until December 10th, the International Human Rights Day. That period overlaps with the 16 days of activism against gender-based violence (Nov. 25 – Dec. 10). The 1st of December is International AIDS Day. So, it’s quite a rich kind of period of activity. The artivism month is designed as a sunshine relay that will start in the Pacific and go all the way to the West. You don’t have to create anything new. If you’ve done a poem or a song, if you’re already planning an exhibition or an event to promote food culture, you can simply join the global artivism month. The activity in your community will then become a piece of a mosaic of actions around the world.
We are sharing tools with participating groups and creatives, so-called recipe books. The first recipe book on the concept is already out. The fundraising recipe book will follow soon. Fundraising tools are very important in the Global South where we don’t have the privilege of, as activists in the Global North, access to well-resourced foundations or public funding even though it’s getting tighter. We cannot continue to have a slavish mentality that somebody somewhere is going to give us a big grant. We’ll provide different recipes of how to raise money, for example from a local business or crowdfunding. As a movement, our aim is to empower people, not trying to raise money to give out small grants. We also don’t want to get into a conflict-of-interest situation where we become a funder as well as a campaign at the same time.
ANA: In your speech you argued that UN climate processes spend decades “mopping the floor while leaving the tab of the over-flowing bathtub running” – managing emissions, the symptoms of the climate crisis, rather than the root cause: the production and proliferation of coal, oil, and gas. In April, the first conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels (TAFF) took place in Santa Marta, Colombia. The meeting brought together representatives from nearly 60 nations – including Angola, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda – as well as scientists, Indigenous Peoples, subnational governments and other stakeholders. 200 subnational governments across six continents, including the City of Bonn and the State of California, have also endorsed the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative. What is the role of cities, provinces and states to overcome fossil fuel dependency and accelerate a just transition?
Kumi Naidoo: Cities and sub-regional governments are the base units of democracy. If you take a country like the United States, where the president is going “drill baby drill” and denying climate science, US cities and states can still lead the way on progressive renewable energy policies. If you count the residents of every democratic state and every democratic city in a red (Republican-leaning) state, it shows that a clear majority of US-Americans are with you and support climate action. Red states are actually very small in population sizes generally, with a few exceptions like Texas which is turning blue anyway (most likely voting for Democrats in the upcoming midterm-elections).
If we take the view that all politics is local and that ultimately the impacts of climate are felt mostly at regional levels, subnational governments are on the frontlines of the climate emergency. National governments can sign a treaty, then make it a national law, but the implementation must happen locally. Local governments historically have been supportive of important treaties, whether it be the landmine treaty or the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Just as nuclear-free cities played a critical role in building momentum towards a treaty banning weapons of mass destruction, now city councils around the world are joining the call for a Fossil Fuel Treaty. They don’t have legal authority to sign treaties, but they have the moral authority to push national governments to do the right thing and to act for the people on the ground. Many national governments are acting more in the interest of fossil fuel companies rather than in the interest of their own citizens.
Editor’s note: The interview has been shortened and edited for clarification.
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