Black History Month profile:
Mumbi Nkonde

Mumbi Nkonde is a Zambian immigrant now based in Sheffield, an anti-racist organiser and local community activist. Guided by Black Feminist principles of connecting struggles and practising solidarity from ‘the margins to the centre’, they’ve been rooted in Black radical organising and working within migrant, housing and climate justice movements for fifteen years.

In their paid work, Mumbi has spent five years setting up the Grassroots Movements Fund to resource social movement work at the scale needed. They are a member of Black Lives Matter UK, a director at Multitudes Cooperative, a director with Roots Mbili Arts, and an adviser with the Good Ancestor Movement.

Mumbi and Faith for the Climate movement builder Rosh Lal had an inspiring conversation over Zoom on 8 October 2025. This first part explores how Mumbi got involved in climate justice and what they learned from the history of the Black Feminist movement.

Part 1

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

Mumbi: I came into being part of climate justice movement work — although I wouldn’t say that that’s where I feel most firmly located most of the time — through being involved in anti-racism work with Black Lives Matter UK and feminist organising with Sisters Uncut. I’ve also been part of various parts of migrant rights organising. For example, I was on the sidelines of SOAS detainee support and End Deportations. It feels important to share that I was able to come into climate justice work through the openings in social movement spaces that understood climate justice work was anti-racism work, was housing rights justice. So it makes sense that now someone like me would feel comfortable in the movement, and I don’t know whether that would always have been true.  

But I want to take it back even before I was involved in community activism. I’m an immigrant from Zambia. I moved to the UK in the early 90s as a six-year-old to join my family and lived in various parts of South East London. Catford in Lewisham, in particular. In my early 20s, having not gone back to Zambia since I left, I wanted to return and understand myself as a Black African, Zambian, Bemba person and tend to have that yearning you have as a diaspora person. I was privileged to get a placement with Voluntary Services Overseas, working with a youth organisation – Beyond Sport Integrated– in a town called Monze. They were incredible and I learned so much about youth-led, community development work. I met a lot of Zambians who were really involved in environmental work. Folks who were working with the Zambian Wildlife Authority, and various NGOs. You know, their work was everything, from understanding the rate at which climate change was really shaping and changing the landscape of local areas and across Zambia, to working to stop poachers, often fuelled by Western interests. I was living near this amazing national park called Lochinvar National Park where the rangers generously taught me so much about the land and the local ecosystem from people who are true stewards of the land. That was beautiful and incredible. But you know, they were worried and they were scared and they were fighting on many fronts.

Sometimes I think it can be really hard to know how you get involved in movement work. I really encourage people to talk to neighbours, join meetings and see what’s going on around you and try out different things as you try to find where your political home is.

I remember my friends, Crispin Imakando and Laura Imakando, whose whole commitment was: How do we bring children and young people together into becoming stewards of the land and into undoing the ways capitalism is polluting and poisoning the land? A lot of the amazing plans they had were to work with children and young people to understand their power and possibility as the inheritors. I was so inspired by that and very much like, okay, that’s actually what the crucial work is. Through all of that I learned and understood how British colonialism through multi-national companies and international aid — structural adjustment programs, for example — were very much to blame for all of the inequities and the poverty and the challenges that were being faced. To be honest, I didn’t have that clear an understanding of that in my teenage years. I wasn’t taught this stuff at school. My parents, although deeply political in their own ways, didn’t talk about things in these ways. I came back to the UK with a much clearer understanding that the charity-based work I’d been involved in was limited. How it kind of individualised these huge problems we were trying to navigate and change. I wanted to be involved in work that had a systemic analysis, is how I would describe it now. I’m not sure if I had that language then.

Around 2013 I got involved in an anti-gentrification campaign to stop the Heygate Estate being pulled under and completely redeveloped, and all of these working class communities — many of them very racialised — being moved out of London. I didn’t know at the time, but that was very much the Socialist Workers Party organising — which I now would not choose as my political home — I did a lot of door-knocking, a lot of, ‘let’s fight back’. I just got involved in a variety of things. And I say that because sometimes I think it can be really hard to know how you get involved in movement work. I really encourage people to talk to neighbours, join meetings and see what’s going on around you and try out different things as you try to find where your political home is. 

Through some friends at the time I joined a political education course through NEON, the New Economy Organisers Network. I was really lucky to be able to meet a lot of other politically like-minded people and just spend hours in these exploratory classes and spaces. Understanding what neoliberalism is, how it functions. Understanding how you might describe the pillars of power that uphold all the structures and systems that we have in place. How you go about campaigning, to challenge, to understand which pillar you are trying to target. What’s the best way to go about it? How are you going to bring other people into it? 

It was a politically active time for me which eventually led to me becoming a part of the Black Lives Matter UK movement. A space that was really rooted in the Black radical tradition,  where understanding how interlocking systems of oppression function and connecting struggles, is such key analysis. So that you cannot talk about race without talking about class, without talking about gender. 

And this is so much the work of the Combahee River Collective, which is a Black feminist, collective and movement in 1970s America. They talked about intersectionality. Which is what I guess is the catch-all term that we use now. They analysed how Black women’s lives were shaped by endemic violence, not only through patriarchy, but capitalism and imperialism, ableism and so many other things. And I think I was just, again, really lucky. To be surrounded by that kind of thinking and those kinds of ideas.

The different activists and organisers in BLM came themselves from having been in lots of other, different, spaces. So I’d been doing a lot of anti-gentrification, housing rights organising, as well as having been a bit involved in the feminist organising within Sisters Uncut. Some people were coming from having been really involved in organising around deaths in police custody and other state structures like detention centres. 

Some people were coming from having been really deeply involved in the climate change movement. And we had found, for all of us in different ways, we had found the previous spaces we’d been in really limiting in our ability to describe what we saw our communities facing. We saw our communities facing these multiple different forms of oppression and inequality, and I think we were all drawn to each other with this broader analysis coming out of the Black radical tradition. 

The thing that we struggled with under the Black Lives Matter UK banner and movement — and obviously we were hugely shaped by what happened in the US — was that we were trying to find our own ways of contributing analysis into that movement, but really rooting it in what the state of racism for Black and Brown people was in the UK. How it is similar, but really different too, and that difference is really very rooted in these specific histories of colonialism. That you can’t talk about race and racism in Britain without talking about British colonialism, imperialism, all of these things. We were really trying to find a way to define what that was here in the UK, whilst feeling part of this bigger international movement. But through all of that, of course, we had to talk about what was happening with climate change. And I’m going to tell you a really specific story.

Something that was deeply moving for me and taught me a lot, was when in 2013 a young girl called Ella Kissi-Debrah, who was I think was nine-years-old, died from multiple asthma attacks as a result of the air pollution from the South Circular in South East London. So when I heard about that story, like many others we were really just… it just perfectly described what it is people have been trying to piece together for a really long time. That there is something very particular about being poor, or poor and Black, that makes you really vulnerable in these particular ways, where you’re going to be living in more polluted areas, whether you’re in England or the Global South.

I think Ella Kissi-Debrah’s story was really deeply moving to so many of us because it’s unfair and unjust, but I think it allowed a whole load of people to be able to speak to these connections between race and class and climate change in a way that hadn’t been so easy to explain. And of course, for me personally, I grew up by the South Circular and I grew up with asthma and I grew up with some of these problems. And there’s always something about that when something is reflected back to you, there’s no way to look away.

Under BLM, one of the things that we all debated about and talked about is what campaigns, what direct actions, did we feel were really crucial and what should we be speaking about at that moment? Because we all came with these different approaches, organising backgrounds. I think knowing what is the most important thing to focus on isn’t always easy, but we coalesced around really wanting to highlight the connections between racism, climate change and living in poor and working class communities.

At the time we talked about British companies like BP who are carrying out the extraction of fossil fuels in countries all across the Global South. And the continuation of that violence is that they could fly in and out of London City Airport, in order to carry out their very important meetings in the poorest areas of England. For me, it was really such a powerful and moving coalition of activists and organisers that normally wouldn’t easily feel connected and aligned to each other’s ideas and missions. It was truly amazing to be part of it because we moved out of the theory of how our struggles are connected and came into the practice of it.

Through the London City Airport action, we wanted to cement in wider public understanding how climate change affected racialised communities and was part of an anti-racist struggle. I don’t know that it worked that well at the time, if I’m honest. When I look back at some of the media that we got, I think we didn’t do the best communication for lots of different reasons. I was just looking back and trying to remember what some of the key points were at the time. You know, it was really trying to hone in on how  London City Airport is in Newham, one of the poorest boroughs in the United Kingdom. It has a huge, poor, racialised community and expanding London City Airport had been something that the local community were fighting for a long time. And we were in relationship with some of the community members, so we really wanted to draw attention to how there was so little consideration for how expanding that airport would increase the pollution that these already poor and working class and racialised communities were dealing with. And how their lives were just considered to be much lesser-than. And had you been going to expand an airport area, in you know, any middle class area, people wouldn’t stand for it. And you probably wouldn’t be able to pass it through. But there’s some very specific form of dehumanization that happens to working class communities.

I think we had a lot of useful stats at the time but one of the problems with our communications is that we had too many stats. And I don’t know that statistics are always the best way to communicate to a wider audience and storytelling, I think, is much more effective. But, I remember learning that Black people in Britain are 28 percent more likely to be exposed to air pollution than their white counterparts and thinking about Ella Kiss-Debrah’s story and the stories of communities all across the Global South being left with polluted air and dirty rivers, and destroyed ecosystems.

We were really interested in also showing something about how capitalism works. So who is travelling on those planes in and out of London City Airport? Well, it’s people who work in the city,  in the offices of multi-national companies, hedge funds and these banks who are themselves directly connected to the histories of colonialism.

I think at the time we talked about British companies like BP who are carrying out the extraction of fossil fuels in countries all across the Global South. And the continuation of that violence is that they could fly in and out of London City Airport, in order to carry out their very important meetings in the poorest areas of England. For me, it was really such a powerful and moving coalition of activists and organisers that normally wouldn’t easily feel connected and aligned to each other’s ideas and missions. It was truly amazing to be part of it because we moved out of the theory of how our struggles are connected and came into the practice of it. For example, the activists who ended up on the runway, locked, were intentionally white activists, as it was anticipated that having Black and people-of-colour (POC) organisers could have led to accusations of a domestic terrorist situation. Although there was criticism at the time about that decision, [consider] the current context of protest being criminalised and ever-difficult to carry out, that you could have a campaign organisation in the UK deemed a terrorist organisation. So, I look back at that time and I think it was really remarkable to bring together people from these different kinds of traditions and activisms under one umbrella. There’s a lot to be proud of in that work. I was recently trying to understand where the conversation is on environmental racism and Runnymede, which is an established, Black-led, organisation had written an amazing report going very in depth into these connections (Editors: Faith for the Climate contributed input to this report). And so it feels now like it’s quite a mainstream way of analysing our current challenges.

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