Black History Month profile:
Mumbi Nkonde (continued)

In the second part of this interview, Mumbi Nkonde shares with Faith for the Climate movement builder Rosh Lal about what they’ve learned about working at the intersection of environmental and racial justice.

You can read part one of the interview here.

Part 2

Rosh: I want to dig deeper into the connections between environmental racism, climate justice and racial justice. What does that mean in practice? You’ve talked about the campaigns you’ve been involved in that are putting that at the heart of the action. What do you think people might not understand between those interconnections? 

Mumbi: I’m not a big theory and big narratives person. A lot of how I come to understand, I come to learn, is through being in conversation, in dialogue, and being in the work. There’s always a fight in grassroots movement work, I think, to wrestle away from values of the academic — only working with long words and reports and all of the things — that then disenfranchise people who are on the front lines from their own oppression and their own experiences. So I’m always really conscious of that. Because I am, well, I’m a university dropout. So I never found academia easy, even though I was brilliant at school. So yeah, let’s blame the university structure. Well, it wasn’t me… that’s what I told my mom. It wasn’t me. It was the university! 

If I look at some of the ways that race and climate change are being spoken about as being more interconnected, maybe one of the things that I see missing is digging into the histories more. You can literally look up a company and trace it back to where it has extracted its resources from, and you can name the actual town or village or area it is in the Global South and understand what is going on in that place right now that means people don’t have access to clean water because their waters have been polluted, for example.

But I think some of the stuff that is so important to understand and to trace, and I’m constantly trying to learn and understand this, is how the economic structures that dominate us were brought about by a system of imperialism through colonial projects. And I think one of the things that colonialism has done really well is taking away all of the learning and understanding around how colonialism and imperialism is still alive and impacts us to this day. And that’s not something you’re going to learn at school. You’re just not going to be told that at school. That is stuff that has to be spoken about and be talked about. In our homes, in our different faith traditions and institutions.

I feel like that is the work that needs to be done in churches, in gurdwaras, in all of these places. Kids are not going to be learning this at school. This is not how I came to understand these things. And I think without understanding colonial projects as having the sole purpose of dominating and profiteering from racialised bodies, from poor bodies, from gendered bodies, and how all those projects and those centuries-long processes bring us to where we are now. I just think that, for me, it’s the hardest to talk about. No one wants to chat about colonialism at the pub, do they? Well, apart from you, Rosh. You do (laughs).

I feel like if I look at some of the ways that race and climate change are being spoken about as being more interconnected, maybe one of the things that I see missing is digging into the histories more. You can literally look up a company and trace it back to where it has extracted its resources from, and you can name the actual town or village or area it is in the Global South and understand what is going on in that place right now that means people don’t have access to clean water because their waters have been polluted, for example.

One of the campaigns that I supported was the VedantaMustGo campaign. So Vedanta is a multinational mining company. It has subsidiary companies in Zambia, subsidiary companies in India, in Ghana. I mean, it’s just huge. And in the context of Zambia, the subsidiary company, which was called Konkola Copper Mines, was responsible for polluting so many villages in the northern provinces of Zambia. The northern provinces of Zambia are where the family on my dad’s side is from. And it’s well known and it’s well understood, loads of the mining communities had gotten together and found a load of NGOs and legal support and tried to take the copper mines to court in order to be able gain some compensation for the fact that whole ecosystems have been destroyed. Which is generational damage. 

What ended up happening is something really complex. But basically, Konkola Copper Mines was a subsidiary of Vedanta, and the way multinational companies work is that the subsidiary company will be like, ‘we don’t have that much money’, because funds are being moved out of the company within the country to the parent company, because the money is in the resources and the [companies] don’t even pay enough taxes. Which is a problem of our governments. 

And because the money’s being moved out, when these mining communities were trying to sue this company, this company just folded. It was folded, it didn’t exist anymore. They did some really clever, smart, things that they do all over the world all the time. Ways in which they get out of being held accountable in any shape or form. This particular case was one of the first cases where they tried to sue Vedanta as the parent company. It was on trial in a British court here because Vedanta was registered here. It was one of the first times ever, and it’s a really interesting thing, in terms of these new forms of trying to bring justice and accountability through appropriate compensation, and actually reparation.

I think Cherie Blair ended up being part of this court case in some shape or form. Because I went to the Royal Courts of Justice for one of the days the case was being heard because I was just like, well, I’m here and loads of those mining communities can’t be here and so a whole load of Zambian folk aren’t going to be here being represented, and so I just want to be there to bear witness. In the end I think there ended up being an out of court settlement. Which ended up not bringing these mining communities anything like the kind of compensation that you’d expect, but it was an interesting precedent. From what I understand, some parts of the climate justice movement have been trying to really push for these new forms of accountability. Some of those can be actually happening here in the heart of empire, where loads of these companies are registered and where loads of the money and the resources get extracted back to.

Anyway, I do think it’s really important for us to be doing research and doing political education around how colonialism and imperialism operate. To this day, it is imbued in the whole of the United Kingdom. All of these powerful forces and structures. And of course, this is what a lot of the Palestine movement I think has been [focusing on] in a really live way. Inviting people into thinking about how settler colonialism works. And what those mechanisms, modes and operations are that dehumanise a whole population of people. How the media are complicit in not telling us the truth of what’s going on. The organising, the communication, the education and the resistance around Palestine, I think it’s been really incredible and very much highlighted, again, that war is one of the worst things for the climate. I’m like, there’s your pollution.

The front line defenders, people, are fighting for their lands and that fight is leading to loads of environmental workers, climate change defenders, being killed. I feel like we really need to tell the stories, and have those names ready to share, those people who’ve died and how they died. How brutal and violent colonialism is. How it doesn’t just look like nation states at war.

Rosh: It’s so well put. You’re so right about how the history of colonialism, the ongoing processes, are made invisible and it’s just the water that we swim in. And it’s hard to see. I did an English Lit. module at uni where we were set Ken Saro-Wiwa’s book, Sozaboy, about the Biafran war. Then I learned about Shell’s complicity in the destruction of Ogoni land, and how that’s bound up with our demand for oil and who gets killed off in pursuit of that. It’s all joined up.

Mumbi: 100 percent. The front line defenders, people, are fighting for their lands and that fight is leading to loads of environmental workers, climate change defenders, being killed. I feel like we really need to tell the stories, and have those names ready to share, those people who’ve died and how they died. How brutal and violent colonialism is. How it doesn’t just look like nation states at war.

It’s people literally fighting for their land and their villages without anything like the military access to arms to be able to fully defend themselves. I think about that and I worry sometimes about parts of the climate justice movement calling for — and I want to be really careful here of the words I use — I think a lot of the climate justice movement, and sometimes faith-based organisations, have a real insistence or a preoccupation with the idea of peace and non-violence. And as someone who worked for a Quaker institution for five years, it was something that I had to learn about and understand and really empathise with and really reflect on whilst holding the fact that I come from a Black radical tradition. I come from anti-colonial struggle as the resistance movements that are influencing me and I want to learn from, that I want to carry that with me and bring with me all the time.

I wish there was more space for understanding, what do we mean by these things and who gets to call for, and claim for, peace and who doesn’t? Who doesn’t have the option? Just wanting to complicate [that]. I think that’s what the question of Palestine has brought into such sharp contrast, right? It has once again brought back this question of who are we saying has to be non-violent? And at what cost? When they are being colonised.

End of Part 2
In the next part, Mumbi shares more about their joys, challenges and inspirations.