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Paul Mooney, the late great African-American comedian and one of the most insightful yet hilarious intellectuals on matters of race, once quipped that every “racially aggrieved” person once deceased returns in another body to collect what is owed to them. Illustrating the point he suggested that the first Black Oscar winner, Hattie McDaniel (perhaps most famous for playing Mammy in Gone With the Wind), had returned to the world as Oprah Winfrey. If Mooney’s thesis is to be believed, there is amusement to be had guessing which figure from history has returned to us in the form of a newly “ex-Nigerian” Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch, the leader of the Conservative party
Appearing on a podcast last week, Badenoch said that she no longer identifies as Nigerian. This was bizarre even by Badenochian standards. Her words: “I don’t identify with it [Nigeria] any more. Most of my life has been in the UK …” She went further: “I’m Nigerian through ancestry, by birth, despite not being born there because of my parents … but by identity, I’m not really.”
The podcast presenter, the former Tory MP and all-round lovely chap Gyles Brandreth, deserves an award for not falling into a laughter-induced coma as Olukemi Olufunto desperately struggled with a self-imposed form of the late Norman Tebbit’s “whose side are you on anyway” cultural loyalty test.
Badenoch isn’t a runaway favourite. Just today Liz Truss, momentarily the Tory leader, now the stuff of actual stand-up comedy, accused her of “repeating spurious narratives” about the economy. That’s a bit cats in a true blue sack: but, listening to the leader of the opposition, now and previously, on matters of race and identity, I do find her confused and confusing.
For someone keen to shed the weight of Nigerian origins, she appears to make much of them, if negatively. Nigerians in the diaspora tend to obsess about three topics: making money, Premier League football and Nigeria. Of this cohort, Badenoch sounds like a recent “Japa” (a person who migrated from Nigeria usually to the west) who just cannot stop talking about “back home”.
A few months ago, the theme was ethnic enmity and corruption. Last month, doing the anti-immigration two-step on Fareed Zakaria’s CNN show, she said her daughters were unable to attain Nigerian citizenship because “I am a woman”. That was sad: cue violins. But it’s also nonsense. The Nigerian constitution confers citizenship on to her children by dint of the fact that one of their parents or grandparents is Nigerian – which is actually more liberal and inclusive than the British approach to citizenship.
It is infuriating that Badenoch tends not to do interviews with people with knowledge of Nigeria or even honest brokers on the Black experience in Britain. The result is that her more confusing pronouncements – such as the contention she “doesn’t like socialism” because of her experiences in Nigeria – go unchallenged. A clued-up interviewer might say: “I put it to you that Nigeria is one of the most brutally capitalist nations on Earth, one without any real welfare state. You actually grew up in a recently liberated former British colony that was struggling under the weight of history and IMF-imposed structural adjustment programmes – the mother of all austerity regimes.” That’s why her response to even the prospect of an appropriate interviewer is to run a one-minute mile.
On one level it’s all comedic, but it also seems sadly revealing. The colonial mindset that everything western is unquestionably superior is one that too many Nigerians have yet to discard: especially Nigeria’s political elite.
These interviews also reveal something significant about Britain and the Conservative party. She says these things in public, knowing there is a market for them. In Brandreth’s podcast, Badenoch says she has not experienced racial prejudice in the UK “in any meaningful form”, adding, “People didn’t treat me differently, and it’s why I’m so quick to defend the UK whenever there are accusations of racism.” That’s great for her – go Kemi. But it hardly describes the general Black experience – as we might hope someone with such a profile would do – or anything backed up by data. So she is spouting derogatory nonsense about her country of cultural origin and misleads about the country she calls home. If there is value to her public utterances, it is hard to discern what that is.
These are trying times, but those of us who feel proudly able to carry multiple identities – enriched by that privilege and truth – will have to go on without Kemi. Nigerians will have to love her, accepting that love is unrequited. Black Britons will seek to know and understand her, even if she shows no obvious yen to know or understand them.
And people can change: for the day will come when tickling rightwing tummies no longer works, and VIP Kemi returns to mundane Earth as Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch. We’ll see what she says then.
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Nels Abbey is an author, broadcaster and the founder of Uppity: the Intellectual Playground
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