Kemi Badenoch: The Africa that was not born in her

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“I am not African because I was born in Africa, but because Africa was born in me.” – Kwame Nkrumah

When Kemi Badenoch, the rising star of Britain’s Conservative Party and the secretary of state for business and trade, declared in a podcast interview that she no longer identifies as Nigerian and has not renewed her Nigerian passport since the early 2000s, the response was swift and divided: confusion, disappointment and a quiet sense of betrayal. For many in the African diaspora, those for whom identity is not merely a matter of paperwork or sentimental affiliation, but an ethical and historical reckoning, her words landed like a self-identity rejection.

“I’m Nigerian through ancestry, but by identity, I’m not really,” she said, as if heritage were an old coat one might shed in the springtime of political ambition. In that moment, it became clear that Badenoch was not simply drawing the borderlines of her own belonging. She was performing a severance. The gesture of disavowing one’s African identity in favour of full alignment with British political orthodoxy is not novel. Many black Brits, especially from the Caribbean Islands, often say they don’t identify with their ancestral roots. But the context gave it sharp, new teeth. Her renunciation issued from within the corridors of British power, from a black woman whose career has been marked not by critique of empire, but by an odious attempt at its vindication.

I) The politics of renunciation

To dismiss Badenoch’s declaration as merely personal is to misunderstand the economy of symbols within which public figures operate. Identity, especially for politicians of colour in the West, is never simply a matter of self-definition. It is staged, mediated and politicised. In her disavowal of Nigerian identity, Badenoch was not retreating into private life; she was creating an allegiance. One could almost hear the colonial echo: Africa is something one is lucky to have escaped, not to be mourned but celebrated as a progressive move.

Her declaration calls to mind what the Nigerian philosopher Ifeanyi Menkiti once described as the African emphasis on becoming a person, not merely being born one. In many African traditions, personhood is not simply inherited; it is cultivated through the practice of communal obligation.¹ Identity, in this sense, is not an ornament of the self, but a site of ethical responsibility. Badenoch’s statement reads as an abdication of precisely that responsibility. It is instead an embrace of the neoliberal fantasy of the self-made individual, stripped of lineage and unmoored from history.

Frantz Fanon, ever prescient, warned of this very dynamic in Black skin, white masks – the colonised subject who seeks assimilation by mirroring the language, dress and values of the coloniser in hopes of becoming palatable to the dominant order.² But this legibility comes at a cost. What is gained in respectability is often lost in rootedness.

II) The shame of the homeland

To be fair, Badenoch’s criticisms of Nigeria are not without merit. Corruption, infrastructural decay and ethno-religious tensions have made many Nigerians question the viability of their republic. But to discuss these crises in isolation, stripped of their colonial genealogy, is to speak the language of imperial innocence. One cannot denounce the house’s ruin while ignoring who set fire to its foundations.

The British Empire’s role in Nigeria’s fragmentation is well documented: arbitrary borders, the extraction of resources, and the manipulation of ethnic divisions for administrative ease. In the postcolonial era, the West continued to script Africa’s economic fate through institutions like the International Monetary Fund. Structural adjustment programmes, enthusiastically championed by the UK, dismantled public sectors, gutted education and health services, and left entire generations economically adrift.³

To present Nigeria as merely dysfunctional, without acknowledging the architecture of its dysfunction, is to recycle the myth of African self-sabotage. This myth is politically useful to white conservatives, but it is intellectually dishonest. As Achille Mbembe has argued, the postcolony is not simply a place of failure; it is a time-space haunted by overlapping regimes of violence, where colonial residues and neoliberal pressures collide.⁴

III) Between estrangement and erasure

There is, of course, no single way to be African. Diasporic life often brings with it a complicated ambivalence: the pull of ancestral belonging against the gravitational forces of assimilation and survival. It would be both cruel and naive to deny that immigrants, especially those raised in hostile Western cultures, develop strategies for self-preservation that sometimes involve strategic forgetting.

Yet, one must distinguish between estrangement and repudiation. Estrangement is a condition – often painful, sometimes temporary – of distance. Repudiation is a matter of politics; it is the transformation of personal drift into ideological posture. When Badenoch frames Africa as a site of backwardness and herself as a product of British meritocracy, she offers her story as a parable that reads in capital letters: NOT ONLY CAN ONE ESCAPE AFRICA, BUT ONE SHOULD AT ANY GIVEN CHANCE.

Here a paradox emerges. In South Africa and Namibia, and increasingly elsewhere on the continent, white citizens of Dutch, German, Portuguese, French or British ancestry routinely describe themselves as African, often with pride and usually without challenge. Their families have lived on the continent for generations; some speak African languages, work the land, pay their taxes and insist on their belonging. Personally, I celebrate their attitude, because what I see as the central problem of racial condescension towards Africa is what I term a settler mentality: conditioning oneself as quintessentially European, though generations of your people have been in Africa. I regard those white people who identify as Africans, while having European descent, as sincere, even if most prefer the historical terms of their presence to be unspoken – something I don’t agree with, because history does not just matter to the status, but is crucial. Still, their African identity, however contested, I regard as something acceptable and legitimate.

But when a black British politician of Nigerian descent distances herself from Africa, the reaction is not only sharper – it is morally dissonant. If the children of settlers may become African through inheritance and rootedness, can the children of the colonised become Western only by erasing the past? Why is proximity to African identity something to be apologised for, while proximity to European identity is something to be claimed?

The double standard is instructive. It reveals not just the asymmetries of power, but also the enduring colonial grammar of belonging: whiteness, even in Africa, connotes permanence; blackness, even in Britain, remains conditional. Badenoch’s disavowal thus does not occur in a vacuum. It is palatable, indeed, useful to this order, because it confirms their larger fantasy, that Africa is best loved from a distance, and best served by those who have outgrown it for the “progressive west”.

This is not merely self-assertion; it is a domesticated kind of defiance, one which conforms to and reinforces the worldview of the British right. The immigrant who distances herself from the migrant, the woman of colour who denies systemic racism, the postcolonial subject who denies coloniality – these are tropes that animate Badenoch’s politics.

IV) The aesthetics of acceptability

Badenoch’s political trajectory is, in many ways, a study in the politics of acceptability. She has become the ideal minority for a party that thrives on majoritarian anxieties. Her race and immigrant background lend credibility to her dismissal of “wokeness” and “identity politics”, while her politics reassures those who would otherwise regard her difference with suspicion.

But such figures are not new. The colonial state, too, had its favoured natives. Those who could mimic the metropole’s mores, who showed no signs of resentment, were elevated as proof of the empire’s benevolence. They served the purpose of humanising the colonial project. Badenoch, in this tradition, is a familiar type, the minority figure who validates the status quo by refusing to challenge it.

Her refusal to acknowledge Britain’s colonial history, her insistence that she has never experienced racism in Britain, her caricature of Nigeria as a place to be escaped – these are not neutral stances. They are rhetorical performances calibrated to fit comfortably within a political party waging war on multiculturalism, immigration and social justice.

V) Against the grain of forgetting

The Pan-African tradition offers a counterpoint. For thinkers like WEB du Bois, Kwame Nkrumah, Amílcar Cabral and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, African identity was not a matter of passport, but of political consciousness. To be African is to stand in solidarity with the continent’s unfinished liberation. It is to name the historical injuries without flinching and to seek their repair without apology.

Ngũgĩ, writing in exile, once argued that “the centre of regeneration must be Africa herself”.⁵ This regeneration cannot be achieved by romanticising the continent, but neither can it be pursued through rejection. The future must be built by those willing to remember, to reimagine and to reconnect.

Badenoch’s right to estrangement is not in question. What is at issue is the public use to which her disavowal is put. By framing her identity in opposition to Africa, she aligns herself with a long tradition of imperial forgetting. But forgetting, as Walter Benjamin reminds us, is never innocent. It is the handmaiden of power, the condition of its repetition.

VI) Memory as inheritance

Édouard Glissant, the Martinican philosopher-poet, once insisted that identity is not essence but relation. We are not simply who we claim to be, but who we are in relation to others: our ancestors, our histories, our debts. To be African, then, is not to be born on particular soil, but to be answerable to its story.

In disavowing her Nigerianness, Badenoch has not merely severed a tie. She has participated in broader amnesia, one that erases the structural violence of empire and the dignity of those who resisted it. The task of Pan-African memory is precisely to resist this forgetting. It is to insist, against all political convenience, that identity is not only personal, but historical, ethical and collective.

Africa is not merely a matter of geography. It is a wound still healing, a question still posed, a promise yet unfulfilled. For those of us who believe in her future, that work of memory and of resistance remains unfinished.

Notes

1 Menkiti, IA. (1984). Person and community in African traditional thought. In African philosophy: An introduction, ed Richard A Wright.

2 Fanon, Frantz. (1952). Black skin, white masks.

3 Rodney, Walter. (1972). How Europe underdeveloped Africa.

4 Mbembe, Achille. (2001). On the postcolony.

5 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. (1993). Moving the centre: The struggle for cultural freedoms.

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