BY ALABA ABDULRAZAK
There is, in the annals of human history, a peculiar breed of souls who, out of an anguished craving to assimilate, go to great lengths—often ignoble ones—to disavow the cradle of their birth. Such is the spectacle of Kemi Badenoch, whose recent pronouncements have mutated from the merely unfortunate to the outright self-lacerating.
Here is a woman who, despite her Nigerian provenance, has weaponised her voice not for bridge-building but for bulldozing, deploying rhetoric that bristles with contempt for the very soil and society that sculpted her.
In her interview with Fareed Zakaria on CNN, Badenoch, the leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party, declared that immigrants from cultures “that do not align with UK values” should be denied entry. The implications, though couched in the polite euphemisms of political discourse, are clear: she is not just suggesting a rethink of immigration policy but constructing a hierarchy of human worth. And in doing so, she is, with a flourish of self-negation, casting her own people—of which she was once indisputably one – into the outer darkness of undesirability.
To parse Badenoch’s logic is to uncover a paradox: the once-Olukemi Olufunto “Kemi” Adegoke, who should be a symbol of multicultural potential, is now a conduit for a peculiarly virulent strain of nativism
She is not content merely to disparage her roots; she seeks to erase them. This is no ordinary provincialism; it is, rather, a willed amnesia, a retreat into the arms of those who have historically viewed her kind with suspicion, if not outright hostility.
In a world where identity is increasingly fluid, Badenoch’s journey from Lagos to Westminster is not a triumph of integration but a tragedy of self-abnegation.
It is a pity, really, that Badenoch appears oblivious to history’s recurring motif: those who repudiate their origins rarely find the acceptance they covet. The archives of public life are littered with cautionary tales—men and women who, in a fever of self-reinvention, sought to disavow their past, only to find themselves marooned between two worlds.
Consider the storied self-loathing of Idi Amin’s henchmen, who, having discarded every vestige of their own moral compass, could never be trusted by their British patrons. Or Wole Soyinka’s chilling aphorism: “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” Except that in this case, the tyranny is not external, but psychological—the servitude of self-doubt masquerading as conviction.
Badenoch’s trajectory is, in many ways, a parable for our time: the striver so desperate for the affirmation of the dominant group that she is willing to erase herself. She imagines herself a new Cromwell, but history may yet remember her as a latter-day Uncle Tom—albeit one with a seat at the cabinet table.
The legacy she scripts for her children and grandchildren is, at best, ambiguous. Will they be proud of a mother who, when the hour of reckoning arrived, chose the condescension of strangers over the dignity of her own blood? Will they not inherit—consciously or otherwise—the curse of the self-estranged, forever haunted by the ghost of identity never fully owned nor fully escaped?
Let it be said: the tragedy is not Badenoch’s alone. It is the tragedy of any mind that mistakes the adoption of the oppressor’s lexicon for liberation. In the end, those who seek to demolish the bridges behind them often find that the paradise they seek does not exist—or, if it does, it is not for them.
In betraying herself, Badenoch is not transcending history but is doomed to be governed by it.
Abdulrazak can be contacted via [email protected]
