Skii Cho

Auntie Kemi, your great-grandma Tinubu would be so proud of you 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾. Such brilliance in carrying on the family legacy.

I have always been fascinated by a particular breed of African politicians in Europe who seem to have made it their life’s ambition to be more British than the British, more French than the French, and more hostile to Africans and immigrants than the most rabid nationalists in their adopted political circles. You find them in Britain, France, Belgium and across Europe, particularly in countries that once colonized Africa. Many are the children of African immigrants, sometimes the first generation born in Europe, whose parents arrived in those countries as foreigners. Yet their children have somehow developed an almost religious devotion to the most reactionary interpretations of European nationalism. They speak about immigration as though their own parents descended from the heavens with citizenship certificates in their hands. And I am not talking about Africans who happen to be conservative. I am talking about those who appear determined to prove their loyalty to their political constituencies by expressing a degree of contempt for immigrants, Africans and their own ancestral history that would embarrass even some European conservatives. The irony would be hilarious if its consequences were not so serious. Because these politicians occupy a particularly convenient position in the racial politics of Europe. Their African ancestry gives certain political movements an opportunity to present deeply contested positions on immigration, race and colonial history through someone whose very presence is then offered as proof that racism could not possibly be involved. It is the political equivalent of the racist who insists that he cannot be racist because he once dated a Black woman. Except that this time, instead of producing a Black girlfriend, they produce a Black politician with an African surname and a spectacular appetite for defending their ideological prejudices. What particularly disgusts me is the historical revisionism that sometimes accompanies this performance. Imagine being so desperate to demonstrate your European patriotism that you begin defending an imperial history whose victims included people who looked like your grandparents. And for what? To prove that you are sufficiently British? Sufficiently French? That your African ancestry has been politically disinfected to the satisfaction of your audience? I find this obsession with proving oneself more authentically European than Europeans themselves intellectually fascinating and morally disturbing. This is the context in which I examine Kemi Badenoch’s politics. Badenoch is entitled to her conservative convictions, just as anyone else is entitled to challenge them. But her Nigerian heritage does not make her interpretation of British colonial history more credible, nor does it make her positions on race and immigration immune from criticism.

Kemi, congratulations on leading a major British party as a Black Woman. It takes real talent to rise to where you are and deceit is what it takes to rise as a Black leader in a western Conservative Party. It is a pity the climb did not leave room for a history book and since you chose to argue in the language of history, let us do the history. Let’s dissect your verbal diarrhea point by point. Everyone participated." Slavery existed on every continent. So did war, and nobody calls a village feud the World War. The transatlantic trade ran for 366 years (1501 to 1866) and put about 12.5 million Africans on ships, of whom about 1.8 million died before they saw the Americas, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. It ran through joint-stock companies, chartered monopolies, Lloyd's underwriters and acts of Parliament. It was hereditary, because the law made the child of an enslaved mother property from birth. It was racial, because a whole continent was defined as chattel. No other system in history combined those features at that scale. Dissolving all of it into "people from every continent" is far worse than intellectual dishonesty. Britain was a market leader, not a participant. British ships carried about 3.2 million Africans, second only to Portugal and Brazil. The Treaty of Utrecht (1713) gave Britain the asiento, a thirty-year monopoly to supply 4,800 enslaved Africans a year to Spanish America. The Royal African Company, chartered in 1672 and headed by the Duke of York, later James II, branded its captives "DY". During Edward Colston's years in its leadership it shipped about 84,000 people, and roughly 19,000 died on the way. You say British taxpayers should not answer for what happened before they were born. They did. In 1833 Britain borrowed £20 million to compensate slaveholders, and taxpayers serviced that loan until 2015, including the descendants of the enslaved. So the principle you invoke was not applied when the cheque went to slaveholders. It only appears when the cheque changes direction. "Navel-gazing" is a curious charge from someone whose party spends more energy on the past (Empire nostalgia, culture war crusades) than most of those you accuse. Defend Britain if you must. But do not use your Nigerian name as the permission slip for arguments Nigerians know better than anyone.