UNITED KINGDOM: In an article dated December 18, 2024, Llyod Evans writes, “Kemi Badenoch is bad at PMQs [Prime Minister’s Question Time) flunked it again, unfortunately. Kemi Badenoch chose poor tactics at PMQs…[and] made flabby speeches.
” Kemi Badenoch is not only bad at PMQs; she is bad at ‘British Politics’. She has a sketchy knowledge of British culture and political history and she is clearly out of her depth – but not because she is a black British woman of African descent. Despite Badenoch’s palpably false plummy upper/middle class English accent, she is a cultural outsider. She was not raised in a British/English upper middle-class family – she was brought up in Nigeria by Nigerian parents. Denigrating Nigeria has become Badenoch’s main political weapon of choice; her politics are about advocating for a tougher British immigration policy that would see many Africans deported from the UK or prevented from seeking asylum in Britain. Whether she likes it or not, Badenoch is a Nigerian woman from the roots of her Afro hair to the soles of her African feet. She lacks a nuanced cultural understanding of what it means to be British or English. England is a multicultural country but nonetheless it is England – when I think of the connotation of Englishness/Britishness, I think of everything that Badenoch isn’t – Badenoch’s superficial Britishness means she is culturally out of her depth because she is the embodiment of her Nigerian culture and upbringing. But right now – Badenoch is busy biting the hand that fed, raised and nurtured her. Like me, Badenoch is British only on paper. Black Africans like us, will always be Africans no matter how long we cohabit with the Europeans. We are raised on African soil, fed African food, breastfed African cultural do's and don'ts from birth – and to our detriment, encouraged to aspire to 'western values' and look down upon our own continent. Badenoch epitomises black African ‘Eurocentric conservatism.’
She is a typical middle class African woman – a flawless product of the British Empire – brainwashed to self-loathe her Africanness and heritage. Badenoch’s speech on immigration on November 27, 2024 titled, “Immigration is too high”. “Migration affects all of our lives in different ways. It certainly affected mine, and that is why I am happy to speak about it without fear,” she claims. Somewhere in the middle of this speech, ironically, Badenoch starts to rant about the failed Rwanda scheme. She describes her own British citizenship as ‘Willy Wonka’s golden ticket’ whilst claiming, “loopholes are wilfully exploited by opportunists,” to dismiss genuine concerns for the safety of asylum seekers being shipped off to Rwanda. Her self-professed British patriotism is mind boggling and disturbing to say the least. She has no ancestral blood ties to England. I have found no research showing that her parents ever settled in the UK and made economic contributions to the country. If there is, then, I stand to be corrected.
Who is Badenoch? In November 2024, Badenoch was elected leader of the Conservative Party (aka Tories). Superficially, this is a great and historic move towards a more modern Britain that isn’t only multicultural, but one that promotes and actively encourages racial equity, equality and by default – social and racial cohesion. Badenoch was born Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke at a private hospital in Wimbledon (UK) in 1980. According to an article by Claudia Cockerell (writing for The Standard, a UK newspaper), Badenoch’s “mother travelled to the UK to give birth, which gave Badenoch automatic British citizenship”. Soon after her birth, her parents apparently returned to Lagos, Nigeria, where the family was based. Badenoch's Nigerian parents with seemingly no ancestral ties to the UK took advantage of the UK’s birth right citizenship aAct, to make sure that she was born in the UK – and could later migrate to the country without the restrictions that she is now fervently advocating for. However, under the Tory government, a party that she currently leads, the UK abolished automatic birth right citizenship and replaced it with the British Nationality Act 1981, which automatically denies citizenship to children of illegal immigrants. If Badenoch was born after the enactment of this Act, she would have been denied British citizenship – hence the description of her ‘Britishness’ as ‘Wonka’s Golden Ticket’. Why did the Tories abolish this immigration policy? To borrow Badenoch’s own political rhetoric – was the automatic birth right citizenship, a policy full of loopholes, which were being ‘wilfully exploited by opportunists?’ Badenoch’s birth in the UK meant she benefited from a free sixth form education on arrival in the UK at the age of 16 and home student status for her two university degrees – including automatic access to UK Student loans.
Why did a 16-year-old Kemi migrate to the UK? According to a report by the BBC, on January 15, 1966, “a group of young, idealistic, UK-trained army majors overthrew Nigeria's democratic government in a violent military coup.” The coup, whose leaders apparently “described it as a brief and temporary revolution to end corruption and ethnic rivalry” in Nigeria, instead ended up making the situation worse. According to the Standard (UK Newspaper), it was due to this political instability that prompted Kemi’s parents “to make use of her British passport” – hence her solo migration to the UK where she lived with a family friend in South London. Badenoch’s migration story as an unaccompanied child migrant to the UK is not unique – it is a common one. According to the UK Refugee Council, in “the year ending September 2022, the UK received 5, 152 applications for asylum from unaccompanied children. Many of them come from Sudan, a country facing political instability following years of civil war, children, in particular, are at risk.” Badenoch’s views on England’s borders and migration In the many hypocritical speeches and stances Badenoch has taken, on her quest to become the first African ‘Queen’ of England, was a claim captured in a short TikTok video.
Everything that she claims she stands for is ironically contradicted by everything she says in this clip. “I don’t want the UK being turned into the sort of place that everybody else is running away from. Somebody has to defend it.” Badenoch does not want to “re-create Nigeria in the UK” – she claims that there are many who come to the UK with the aim to “re-create what they are familiar with in the UK – that is bad for social cohesion and bad for what for the very things that made Britain what it is...liberal values...free speech, equality under the law.”
All these things, Badenoch argues, are “thrown away with cancel culture”. Badenoch’s fight against ‘cancel culture’ and her anti-woke stance, is ironically an imposition of her own Nigerian ‘Conservative’ views on the British people – it is an attempt to police the British people’s democratic right of ‘freedom of expression and free speech.’ Ironically, in her mission to ‘defend’ England from foreigners and ‘woke’ politics, Kemi is busy creating the ‘Nigeria’ she apparently ‘ran away’ from, in England. It would be naïve to perceive Badenoch’s divisive and nonsensical politics as good for ‘social cohesion’. Badenoch’s miseducation In an article titled, ‘What Kemi Badenoch gets right about colonialism’, (by Robert Tombs, republished by the Spectator, UK newspaper), Tombs claims; “Kemi Badenoch has developed a habit of truth telling,” referring to Badenoch’s controversial comments in which she calls reparations a ‘scam’.
I think we can all agree that Badenoch is too old for history lessons and if the truth be told, Badenoch knows ‘the colonial history’ but she has ‘developed’ the habit of wilfully distorting it. Badenoch, as Robert Tombs claims, has not ‘developed a habit of truth telling’ – she has developed a habit of ‘truth’ twisting and an obsession with distorting historical facts. Badenoch has openly denied that Britain is wealthy and developed today because of its colonial history and the enslavement of Africans. Nigeria, a country that Badenoch has repeatedly referred to as ‘very poor’, was colonised by the British from 1886 to 1960. The question we should be asking ourselves today – or more specifically asking Badenoch is, what were the British doing hanging around a ‘very poor country’ for 76 years? We all know that slavery and colonialism did not stop because Europe’s perception of Africa and Africans changed. As Martin Luther King once aptly put it; “there comes a time when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of exploitation.”
The history of Africa’s poverty On an ill-omened Saturday morning, on November 15, 1884, Leopold II of Belgium reportedly declared: "I do not want to miss a good chance of getting us a slice of this magnificent African cake.” The infamous remark was made just before the commencement of what came to be known as The Berlin Conference. The sole purpose of this conference was for European powers including Britain, to discuss the oppression of Africans through the exploitation and looting of Africa’s resources. After this history-defining conference, Britain came out with a whopping 22 (out of 54 slices) of the ‘magnificent African cake’. Badenoch, has, in her efforts to distort history, ‘developed the habit’ of telling the British that Africa benefited from colonialism and European Imperialism. Badenoch has unabashedly and dismissively described reparation calls and arguments as “a scam” and urged the British to not, “fall for it.”
Who is scamming who? Genuine calls for reparations or Badenoch’s divisive politics? Reparations – what does this mean? Partly borrowed from French and Latin, the etymology of the noun reparation lies in the Middle English period (1150-1500), used in reference to recompense for an injury, injustice, or action of putting right a bad situation. The Oxford English dictionary, however, defines the term as the “the action of making amends for a wrong or harm done by providing payment or other assistance to the wronged party...[or] payment or assistance given in compensation for such a wrong." A statement published online on November 25, 2022 by the Bank of England, highlights that on “28 August 1833 the British Parliament passed legislation that abolished slavery within the British Empire, emancipating more than 800, 000 enslaved Africans. As part of the compromise that helped to secure abolition, the British government agreed a generous compensation package of £20 million to slave-owners for the loss of their ‘property’.”
Note: The word ‘property’ as used in the above sentence, highlights the extent to which the slave trade dehumanised black people. The last payment of this blood money was made in 2015, which means Black Caribbean-Brits who are the descendants of the Africans who were enslaved by the British, and who were brought over to Britain in the 1950s, have financially contributed towards paying off this morally reprehensible ‘debt’ for more than 60 years. Let this sink in. Does Badenoch also view the £20 million ‘reparation’ payment to the descendants of British slave-owners as a ‘scam’ or does she approve and applaud? Badenoch: Britain’s black messiah? Is Badenoch’s political rhetoric for the greater good and advancement of humility (Ubuntu), equality, and racial cohesion? Apparently, she likes to “fix problems” and believes one “can’t find a better place to do this than in politics” – but she only wants to fix Britain. Why isn’t she passionate about ‘fixing’ Nigeria’s problems that she relishes talking about even when it is not appropriate? Why should the British people trust Badenoch when she constantly and callously throws her own country and her fellow Nigerians under the bus for personal gain? Badenoch is unashamedly anti-black, anti-racial cohesion and equality and ‘anti-woke’. To better understand this stance, we need to appreciate what being ‘woke’ means.
Denotatively, the word ‘woke’, is the past tense of the verb – ‘awake’ but used as slang (in the US) it means “to wake up and smell the coffee” - to be “realistic or aware and to abandon a naive or foolish notion.” The most recent addition to the Oxford English Dictionary, connotatively defines ‘woke’ as being in “a state of awareness or vigilance; being well-informed, up-to-date, being alert to racial or social discrimination”. ‘Woke’ is a term used in the West (particularly in the UK and US) to refer to a state of being aware of societal and political injustices, such as the persecution and/or discrimination of certain groups based on their race, gender, sexual orientation and disability. In plain English therefore, Badenoch is telling the British public to refuse to be ‘aware’ of the harm caused by inequality and injustice – she is encouraging them to reject social and racial cohesion.
I find it hard to believe that Badenoch actually believes in the divide and rule Tory dribble that she is preaching to the British people – but she has to do it because the determined African in her, has to do and say whatever it takes to rule the people who once colonised and enslaved her ancestors. The truth is, if you are Black and British, Badenoch doesn't care about your rights nor humanity, if you are LGBTQ and British, she doesn't care about your rights nor your dignity, if you are a woman and British, Badenoch doesn't care about your rights – if you have additional learning/educational needs, Kemi thinks you are “given unfair societal benefits.” Badenoch doesn’t even care about the Great British sandwich (a cultural staple) because she is a black African woman steadfastly brought up on beef steak and jollof rice.
*BETTY KNIGHT is a PhD student at the University of Winchester, UK, where she is completing a joint creative and critical project on voice appropriation in postcolonial and transatlantic literature. She is the author of A Nest of Voodoo Dolls (2013) and Black Cloud Rider (2014). She is an anti-racism advocate, poet, and editor of the forthcoming Botswana Women Write: The Spoken Word Poetry Anthology.
