Black History Month profile:
Bokani Tshidzu

Bokani is a London-based artist originally from Zimbabwe. Her art explores how we connect with each other, the earth, and beyond. She creates abstract glass paintings, installations, computational and conceptual artwork. Bokani has also been Operation Noah’s Bright Now Campaign Officer since March 2020. She coordinates communication about the campaign with partners and liaises with religious organisations divesting from fossil fuels. Bokani was co-founder of sustainability start-up Vertigo Ventures and has previously interned in politics and finance. She has a degree in Politics with Economics from the University of Bath.

Bokani and Faith for the Climate director Shanon Shah sat down for an in-person conversation at Romero House, home of our friends at CAFOD and Operation Noah, on 16 October 2025. This first part explores how Bokani got involved in climate justice and how she sees its interconnections with racial justice.

Part 1

Shanon:  How did you find your way into the climate justice movement?

Bokani: At university I was always involved in social justice. I went to university in Bath for my undergrad. It wasn’t the most diverse place, as you can imagine. But I was part of the Catholic society there and we would volunteer with a homeless shelter and visit the elderly. And so, for me, it has always been important to be active in my faith, active in society in my faith. I didn’t feel like a very rich student, but I always felt like I had enough to be volunteering. I might not have been able to give money, but I was able to give of my time and of my energy and of my gifts, such as they are.

I’ve always cared a lot about people’s experiences and it wasn’t maybe until 2015 that I really connected the dots between my interest in humanitarian issues of peace and the climate crisis, which I’d always thought of as [the concern of] tree huggers over there, and not connecting the fact that I too am nature and part of nature. I hadn’t connected the incredible importance of that reverence to the planet. It had always felt very separate to me, and maybe perhaps in a classist way. Something that, like, fancy white people cared about, and not relevant to me.

Yet I was brought up by my father [who] worked on farms in Zimbabwe. My grandmother had her own garden, she had like six trees in an inner-city working-class Black neighbourhood in Hulayo, Zimbabwe. Maybe that utilitarian way of thinking about nature was part of why I didn’t connect the dots with how vital [it was] to my well-being, to our well-being, and how our common home connects us as siblings in our home, and that the health of the planet is our health and vice versa.

At university, I began having more conversations about what that means, what sustainability really means, and to critique some of the systems, companies, and policies that we see attacking nature. And I hadn’t drawn those connections between our economics, ways of living, and nature. And society. And health. And faith. All these things had felt separate roughly until 2015, for me. I read Laudato Si‘ because our university chaplain might have recommended it, and then friends were reading it at the time. But I didn’t come back to it I think until 2018. And it just felt so honest. An assessment of what our world looked like. And what was going wrong in our world. Really, I think when it comes to climate, reading Laudato Si’ probably radicalised me the most, because it made concrete a record of things I had felt I was witnessing and experiencing, but didn’t have the language for.

I’ve always been more proactive than passive. I’m not a very good spectator. I felt like that I should see that this is how you’re having an impact, whether or not you know it. This is what your commercial choices are making. This is what your career choices are doing in the world. This is how your spirituality is showing up. In your relationships with others. And I found that really, in Laudato Si’.

Shanon: I also read Laudato Si’ in full a lot later. I’d been working at Faith for the Climate for a while already and I was inundated by things to read. And then realising one day, ‘I know this document called Laudato Si’, I know the headlines, but I really need to read it in full.’ And even reading it after all those years, I was like, this is beautiful. And it’s so prescient. In hindsight, we would phrase some of the problems differently now, with the knowledge and the analysis that we have. But it was all there already.

Bokani: Yeah, it’s very rich. And I think it’s the first time I’d ever read anything in full written by a Pope.

I’m a cradle Catholic, and I think having a real sense of ownership of my maturity is about saying, okay, I’m no longer a child now. I must now be contributing back to this thing that I’m a part of, which is the Church.

I’ve always been more proactive than passive. I’m not a very good spectator. I felt like that I should see that this is how you’re having an impact, whether or not you know it. This is what your commercial choices are making. This is what your career choices are doing in the world. This is how your spirituality is showing up. In your relationships with others. And I found that really, in Laudato Si’.

Shanon: I felt included in it as well because to me, it’s a very Catholic document. But when you read it, you realise it’s so open and it cites influences from other spiritual and faith traditions. So that brings you in and you feel included.

Bokani: I think Pope Francis wrote it to the world. I don’t think he wrote it only to or for Catholics. And maybe that says something about how I’ve always seen my faith as I was brought up in a Catholic family. I find richness of the experience of God in that tradition. But I’m often struck by the fact that I think I have religiosity just within my makeup, that I’ve always needed to find God. If I’d been brought up in a Muslim family, I think I would be a devout Muslim. That allows me to recognise that Catholicism was brought to my family by colonialism. So, it has these complex qualities as a relationship, my relationship to the Church. It’s a rich one for me, but I can easily understand how for a lot of people it’s an abusive or toxic one.

Again, that need to not be passive in it, for me, is about saying, well, if I’m a part of this church, how do I relate with the rest of the world? And I felt like Pope Francis was not speaking to an echo chamber. He lived out his faith in an inclusive and expansive way. And I think love is expansive and inclusive.

I think there’s a spiritual and a relational repair that climate justice brings about when we learn how to be in harmony with the land, when we learn how to be in harmony with using what we need and not just for endless growth. We stop harming the people who are on those lands, who look after and protected those lands for centuries. And we learn to value everybody’s life as dignified and as important when we stop trying to put hierarchies of economics, which is what climate injustice does.

Shanon: That leads quite nicely to my next question. And this doesn’t need to be a standard analytical or activist answer. Personally, from your heart now, how would you express the connections between climate justice and racial justice?

Bokani: As I said, I’m from Zimbabwe, and so my understanding of who I am is based on that connection to that land. There’s a lot to be said for my Ndebele and Kalanga heritage that is quite a communal way of thinking and being. And there are the traditions which are around how we respect the land. I think a lot about what colonialism did to separate people from that relationship and from each other and to isolate people from each other.

When I think about racial justice, I think about how there’s a need for that repair, as a starting point of what justice might look like. I think the harms that existed are not only those of tearing people away from their heritage but from their sovereignty, their ways of ruling themselves, their ways of making means and being independent. Now, compounding all of that is the fact that people who are racialised, who’ve had land stolen generations ago, or have been brought to the West by economic or other means, those people suffer disproportionately from the climate crisis.

And this is one of the things that I just hadn’t connected with the other things that I cared about. Why were people hungry anywhere in the world? It didn’t make any sense to me. Why were there wars? All these are exacerbated by control of land. Or water, or natural resources. And so, I began to realise that the impact of the climate crisis – whether it was flooding, droughts, air pollution – were happening to people who look like me. People with similar backgrounds. And, disproportionately, to those people when they haven’t contributed as much to the climate crisis by way of pollution or use of natural resources. That felt really unfair. I couldn’t separate these things and so, for me, racial justice and climate justice go absolutely hand in hand, and it’s not only about economic development and access to opportunities and to be able to make a living.

I think there’s a spiritual and a relational repair that climate justice brings about when we learn how to be in harmony with the land, when we learn how to be in harmony with using what we need and not just for endless growth. We stop harming the people who are on those lands, who look after and protected those lands for centuries. And we learn to value everybody’s life as dignified and as important when we stop trying to put hierarchies of economics, which is what climate injustice does.

Shanon: I don’t know if you’re familiar with this famous paper about the colonisation of consciousness. It’s about the process of colonial control of water systems and resources in Southern Africa. According to this paper, the colonial system tangibly took over these resources, but at the same time it also colonised the consciousness of the people so that they would start to think about water differently, even where water comes from, or their beliefs about rain and how rain comes to us. And it’s about how all these indigenous beliefs became denigrated through the colonial system, which is the less visible way of how colonialism works. Colonialism didn’t just take the material resources. It kind of destroyed the consciousness of colonised people, too, who previously understood the resource of water as sacred, as spiritual. So, there might be a ritual to make rain and then a colonial Christian missionary might say, ‘No, that’s wrong, how could you think this? That’s really stupid.’ And so on. And it’s a process. And there are excerpts of dialogue in this paper where you can see how the Indigenous populations were trying to argue back but weren’t able to take charge of the terms of the conversation anymore, such that eventually the collective consciousness gets eroded, and people just lose that sacred link with this natural resource.

Bokani: I’m obsessed with language and I feel really thankful that I still speak Ndebele, which is a dialect of Zulu, and I can hear Kalanga. And so, one way that this consciousness isn’t lost is in the language, because the word for rain is Zulu, which we associate with Amazulu, the nation – Zulu peoples. But there’s a reason they were connected with the idea of rain, because their prosperity came from their knowledge of where the rains were, and so they could farm. I’m fascinated. It took me till this year to make that connection between the word for rain and the word for heavens, and this nation of the Zulu people, and what that connection between the three means. And even as I explained it in English, I realised how flattening that English is, actually, because the rains, the heavens, the Zulus – they’re identifying themselves as one. And I’m still unpacking what that means.

End of Part 1
In the next part, Bokani shares more about her joys, challenges and inspirations.