Kumi Naidoo is a human rights and climate justice activist from South Africa. He was Executive Director of Greenpeace International (from 2009 through 2015) and Secretary General of Amnesty International (from 2018 through 2019). Naidoo also served as the Secretary-General of CIVICUS, the international alliance for citizen participation, from 1998 to 2008.

He was an activist against the apartheid regime and its educational system in South Africa. Naidoo’s activism went from neighborhood organizing and community youth work to civil disobedience with mass mobilisations against the white controlled apartheid government. He has written about his activism in this period in his memoirs titled, “Letters to My Mother: The Making of a Troublemaker.