Rev. Sue Brittion is an Anglican priest who was born in Łódź, Poland, in 1938. Her family left Poland on holiday to Britain when she was 18 months old in August 1939. As a result of the Nazi Germany invasion of Poland, the family never returned to their homeland and lost all their possessions there. Sue Brittion emigrated to South Africa at the age of 19 in 1957.
Trained in many fields, including conflict handling, direct non-violent action, reconciliation, peace monitoring and social action, Sue was an active anti-apartheid campaigner and a founder member of the End Conscription Campaign (ECC).
She has managed the Resource Team for the Diakonia Council of Churches in Durban and was deeply involved in political conflict resolution during the late 1980s and early 1990s. She helped to organize the Network of Independent Monitors, a coalition of civil society organizations that monitored political violence.
As a feminist theologian, Sue was active in the successful Movement for the Ordination of Women (MOW) in the Anglican Church, and has been ordained as a priest.
Sue Brittion is still deeply committed to a life of activism and now concentrates her efforts as a very active environmental activist. She helped to steer the early development of the Southern African Faith Communities Environmental Institute, and she is a member of the Board. This has led her to introduce environmental work to the World Conference of Religions for Peace. She was recently honoured with the Mahatma Gandhi International Award for Reconciliation and Peace in recognition of her lifelong work for justice.