Black History Month profile:
Mumbi Nkonde (continued)
In the final part of this interview, Mumbi Nkonde shares with Faith for the Climate movement builder Rosh Lal what brings them joy and how they navigate challenges.
You can read part two of the interview here. You can also read part one here.
Part 3
Rosh: What aspect of this work is joyful?
Mumbi: It’s the relationships that you build. I just feel like it’s like a boring answer. But I’m personally very energised, and see this work as being so deeply and beautifully relational. Learning to do a direct action, you have to build trust. So much trust and understanding. Between a set of people that to some extent might be strangers, but then become like comrades, you know? And I feel like those processes are really special. The pub after the protest is one of my favourite things. Because there are in many ways so few spaces for us to be in deep political conversation. And I think there’s something quite limiting about meetings as the place for that. Because, you know, what time is the meeting? Can this person make it? And people are tired and blah. And the meeting has got an agenda, so it doesn’t always get to meander around as it should. And I just think, you know, that meetup after people have been doing political work together is special.
There’s a kind of vulnerability, there’s hopes, dreams, there’s criticisms, I love that. It’s the beating heart and drama. And you know, the breaking bread. I’m part of a queer community cinema club. We meet every month and we watch films together and we eat food together. We try to be in political work in a joyful way. Seeing the power and beauty of popular culture as an amazing route to doing political learning and deeper understanding. I love things like that. I love people coming together. And breaking bread.
Sometimes we have some really fierce debates about whether or not they enjoyed that film, or what was the filmmaker trying to do in that film, and it makes me think, I’ve recently been reading Claudia Jones’ autobiography. Claudia Jones was one of the creators of the Notting Hill Carnival and in her own right, and in many ways, was just an amazing political activist and political organiser. One of the quotes from her is ‘art is the genesis of a people’s freedom’. And I think if you’d spoken to me like, five, six, seven years ago, I’d just be, ‘no, we’ve got to be door knocking and we’ve got to be in direct action’. And actually now I just realise more and more the way to bring people together into sustained, continuous, political organising, activism and resistance is to work with beautiful things. Things that are joyful and things that are delicious and that open us up to being connected to each other. Then you’ll find that the other things are built out of that.
For example, on our street, we’ve got a community garden that everybody helps to take care of. And I think it’s actually quite an important way in which we’re able to be connected to each other as neighbours. Because we have a lot of pride in the garden and it’s where you might bump into people. And I think it means that our WhatsApp group has a thing where we’re neighbours, but we’re neighbours that have this thing that we do together. It brings us into a much deeper connection and relationship to each other, to then be able to do the political work at some point when it’s needed. And maintaining the community garden is its own form of political work.
Rosh: I love that. Creating the space where we’re open to each other, that’s so important. And if I can ask the opposite question about your challenges, however you want to define that?
When those defeating moments come, I don’t feel bouncy. I don’t feel like you should just bounce back. I actually feel like we have to let the grief have a place. And sit with it in some ways and find ways to sit with it with others. Being in collective grief and moving much more from a place of acknowledging what’s hard and what’s painful and what’s disappointing and what it feels like you’ve lost and what impact you are really worried about.
Mumbi: I think what I find really challenging at this point in my life journey… this year for me in particular has just felt so full of grief. And loss. And I just feel so much more sensitive to it and so much less able to bounce back from it than I would have done, you know, 10 years ago. Like in 2016, we lost [the] Brexit [vote]—by we, I mean this wider, progressive, liberal-left. And I remember that being really devastating and being surprising. But, you know, I felt like I was in and around people who could bounce back from it, following that.
We had a massive anti-racism organising meeting, in the old converted church that I was living in London Bridge at the time. And we managed to fit in, I don’t know, 40, 50 people to talk about how we wanted to organise in our communities, how we wanted to respond, all of that. And we were just so bouncy. And now… when those defeating moments come, I don’t feel bouncy. I don’t feel like you should just bounce back. I actually feel like we have to let the grief have a place. And sit with it in some ways and find ways to sit with it with others. Being in collective grief and moving much more from a place of acknowledging what’s hard and what’s painful and what’s disappointing and what it feels like you’ve lost and what impact you are really worried about.
I just feel the grief and the loss a lot more. And I just actually need to be in spaces that are willing to hold that. And work with that a lot more rather than rush over it or brush over it. In the healing justice movement and all of the amazing people like Prentis Hemphill, whose book What It Takes to Heal is really inviting all of us into doing that kind of healing and repairing work, in order to better be able to show up to do the community activism and political work. And actually to me that connects really beautifully to the role of spirituality and faith in political organising work. I feel way more attuned to how necessary and important that is than I did when I was younger.
Rosh: Can I dig into that a little bit and ask how that spirituality and faith turns up for you and what you are engaging with?
Mumbi: Yeah, so I grew up Christian. I left the church probably when I was about 16. Actually, it just didn’t speak to how I felt. I saw people around me able to be in these practices that felt really hollow in me, I felt like I didn’t believe. And I’m just not very good at pretending.
So when I was old enough, I was able to be like, ‘I don’t think I want to go to church anymore’. And surprisingly, I remember my parents receiving it really well. And I feel like I’d quite like to ask them again because they are deeply Christian and a lot of the Zambian community is very conservative Christian. Actually it’s really difficult to say you don’t believe in God. Which I don’t think was where I was coming from. I think I just didn’t know how to be in the practice within the Roman Catholic Church.
And then I spent many years not really connecting to any kind of faith-based, spiritual practices, at all. But I had done religious education as an A-level, and one of my teachers was Buddhist. And he was a white Englishman. And he was just a Buddhist and he spoke about it. And I just found it deeply fascinating and felt drawn to it, although I didn’t pick up or do anything with it. I just remember enjoying going to the classes and having some sense of ‘there’s really something in this’. And thinking meditation sounded really cool (laughs) compared to, like, praying. And I feel like there is something really important about how you might receive Buddhism as a 17-year-old and receive those ideas and they might feel a little bit more open to you. If you’ve grown up and been in a tradition that feels more restrictive, ‘we pray like this and we stand and we sit and we sing these songs and we do this at this point’.
And then you’re being given ideas about a tradition that obviously has its own conservative and more traditional ways of doing things, but has a whole load of it that feels expansive. So I always had that in the back of my mind. And then many years ago, I came across people like Lama Rod Owens, who wrote the book Radical Dharma with Reverend angel Kyoda williams and Jasmine Syedullah. And it was just incredible to encounter because they’re all different kinds of Buddhist practitioners. Most of them were brought up in Christian traditions and so they’ve really found a way to bring that in. And I think the Christian tradition in African American communities has this real different flavour to what Roman Catholicism in the United Kingdom is like, let’s be honest.
I think there is a kind of liberatory politics imbued into some of the Black Christian churches in the US in a different way to what I’ve personally experienced here in the UK. Which is not to say that it doesn’t exist, I’m saying that I haven’t experienced it, but they [the writers of Radical Dharma] were really able to bring that Christian tradition stuff with what they found beautiful, helpful, expansive, freeing and liberating about the different Buddhist traditions they’re in.
Most importantly they were really able to connect it to social justice work, they were just so beautifully saying ‘the Buddhism that says that what you should do is go and meditate in a cave somewhere is not the Buddhism that we can be practising in this time of polycrises’. Then thinking about Thích Nhất Hạnh and everything he says about Engaged Buddhism, about Buddhism being something that has to be alive in your every day, as a way of living your every day.
It’s really funny because I don’t talk about it that much, so it’s really good that you asked me about it because it was quite a crucial part of some years of me understanding how to be in social justice, political work, but being able to do it in a more sustained way, being able to do it in a way where it was rooted—more rooted— where I had some practices to help with the grief and the loss. As well as to help you with the reimagining and the beautiful faith you have in fighting for a free Palestine. Yeah, I found it really helpful, although I veered away from it in more recent years, which is something to unpack another day.
Some of the questions my nephews ask, it’s very clear that they have the beautiful beginnings of the sharpest critical lens that then is dulled down in them, right? In more recent years I’ve thought a lot more about the oppression of children by adults. I find it really mind-blowing how little we talk about this in social justice and movement spaces.
Rosh: Can I ask a broader question about what inspirations you have for keeping motivated, keeping in the fight, in the struggle? What inspires you to keep going?
Mumbi: So in more recent years, carrying on from how I had a period of time where I was really interested in Buddhist practice, in more recent years, I’ve become really interested in what were the rituals and faith practices that pre-existed Christianity which was brought to Zambia, Southern Africa, [and] many parts of the Global South through kinds of really, deeply, violent colonial practices and was used as a tool. Even though, of course, Christianity is more than just that, but there are specific ways it was used as a tool.
I was actually just like, well, what did we do before everybody was a conservative Christian in Zambia, or in other parts of the world? And it’s not been easy to find out. So I’m really interested in ancestral practices and Indigenous practices that bring us being into relationship with the land. I think that I’m only at the beginnings of thinking about this and understanding what any of it is and how to embody it and how to be in any kind of ritual practice around it. But I think what does keep me going, what does inspire me, is feeling myself as part of these long ancestral lines and lineages.
But not just your ancestors as it relates to your biological ancestry, but the lineages that you are part of, you are learning from and you’re trying to build on. I think that is the way that I kind of try to stay grounded in this work. Hearing about, learning about people that came before me. You know, right now I’m looking at a picture. I’ve got a picture on my altar of my grandmother. She was an amazing carer, she was an absolute warrior. Just raised four kids mostly on her own and was a nurse and was very involved in her community and all of that. And I’m absolutely shaped by that. I have no doubt about it, and there are many of these women in my family that I am massively shaped by.
I don’t know if that makes sense. I’m interested in being part of this work with The Good Ancestor Movement, because I really like the idea of asking ourselves, ‘what kind of ancestor would I be’? I find it a really interesting, really inspiring question and I think it works so beautifully in the context of climate justice work because what we’re trying to do is become stewards of the land and of all of these species that we rely on, and rely on us.
I really love the idea that there are trees that I meet all the time that I think of as maybe being my ancestors. There’s a baobab tree that I met in Lochinvar National Park in Zambia and I cannot tell you what that experience was because everybody would think I’m a bit mad or a bit woo-woo. But I felt a connection and a kinship to this tree. And I think about this tree all the time. The way that tree has stayed with me, and many other trees. I just think we actually need to be inspired in much more expansive ways. And I think I’m just at the beginning of some of that. As well as obviously just being incredibly inspired by so many of the incredible activists, organisers, thinkers, practitioners who are planting seeds for us to water [Editors: the names are listed below]. I think mostly it’s just not seeing yourself as an individual, but being really inspired by being part of something bigger and more collective than yourself, including non-human entities.
Rosh: What advice would you give to your younger self?
Mumbi: Yeah, that’s such a lovely question. Because I think so much at the moment about what it’s like to be a young person living in this time. I don’t remember what I was like at 16-years-old. First of all, school is not the be-all and end-all. Because I was really like a keen-o. I really thought school was such a crucial, important part of me having a good future. And by the way that’s not me saying don’t give two s**ts about school. Wow, my nephews might read this one day. Well, it’s just not the be all and end all of it. It’s not where all learning happens, if actually the majority of your learning. Be in it and do your best and you know, really pay attention to what energises you and what excites you, as well as, having to just pay attention to the stuff that you have to slog through, you know?
But I don’t think I knew that. I don’t think I understood that there was so much more learning that I was going to do outside of the school structure. And in particular, because I went on to find university incredibly hard. I was just mentally not in the right place and it wasn’t the right time for me to go to uni at all. But because I was coming from this working class migrant background, it didn’t seem possible for me to be like, ‘I don’t want to go to uni for like two, three years’. It was like, ‘I got s**t to do’. I need to get into a job and have a career and all of that and I wish I’d just taken two, three, years to do other things, because I think I would have been able to come to the experience of being in the university space differently. I would have been able to find the stuff in it that was useful and know how to discard the things I should discard and ultimately to be able to come with a critical lens.
Some of the questions my nephews ask, it’s very clear that they have the beautiful beginnings of the sharpest critical lens that then is dulled down in them, right? In more recent years I’ve thought a lot more about the oppression of children by adults. I find it really mind-blowing how little we talk about this in social justice and movement spaces.
Again, I’m just at the beginnings of being like, ‘wow it really sucks to be a child’, so, you know, thinking about my younger self, I’m just having more kindness towards myself. And being a little easier with myself and feeling I put so much on my shoulders. And because I didn’t have the language to understand the particular forms of oppression that you’re just going through because you’re literally a child. Yeah, I wish I had been easier and kinder to myself and in the words that I had inside my own head.
Rosh: That is such a great answer to that question. It took me in a direction that was unexpected. That was great, Mumbi. Thank you.
Editors’ note: The following is a list of people and organisations, past and present, that have inspired and shaped Mumbi in their work of activism. Faith for the Climate includes this list in full in the spirit of mutual learning and inspiration and critical thinking – inclusion is not necessarily endorsement: