When home becomes a punchline: Kemi Badenoch and the politics of disavowal

BY FOLORUNSO FATAI ADISA

“I went to a secondary school. It was called a Federal Government Girls School in a place called Sagamu, and that was like being in prison.” – Kemi Badenoch

Kemi Badenoch has made a habit (indeed, a politics) of narrating Nigeria as a failed origin story. In doing so, she weaponises personal discomfort as public evidence, turning her own biography into a cautionary tale about Blackness, Africanity, and the miracle of British deliverance. This is not merely a memory shared in passing, but a deliberate message crafted for political capital. Her statement about Sagamu is neither a private lament nor a measured critique; it is a rhetorical performance that serves to reinforce her image as a self-made product of British civilisation, someone who overcame the weight of a troubled continent and emerged as a refined voice in Westminster.

The metaphor of Sagamu as a prison is a loaded one. Sagamu is no utopia, and Nigeria is not without its faults. The failures of public education, underfunding, overcrowding, and infrastructure decay are real and deserve honest confrontation. But Badenoch’s narrative leaves no room for complexity, for shared national struggle, for the soul of a country that has, despite adversity, produced minds of brilliance and character.

She makes no distinction between personal hardship and national identity. Her school wasn’t simply inadequate; it was incarcerating. Her girlhood, not just difficult, but a sentence. Her escape, not a pursuit of opportunity, but an act of liberation. In reducing an entire educational and cultural experience to a metaphor of bondage, she does not offer reflection; she offers erasure.

This flattening of experience is what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie described as “the danger of a single story.” Nigeria, in Badenoch’s retelling, becomes a cautionary fable for Western audiences already steeped in colonial nostalgia and suspicion of African capability. The school is prison. The country is chaos. The identity is a burden to be shed. It is a tale as old as empire: the civilised subject who must first be separated from their savage past before being accepted into polite society. Badenoch has mastered this separation, not just rhetorically, but ideologically. Her political persona is built on the denial of collectivity. She doesn’t simply differ from her Nigerian heritage; she distances herself from it. That distance is not treated as a regretful necessity, but as a mark of success.

In doing so, she aligns herself with what Paul Gilroy calls “postcolonial melancholia”, a longing within the British national psyche for the imperial past, for a time when Britain brought order to the world. In this moodscape, Badenoch’s story becomes not only palatable but ideal. She is the Black woman who condemns where she came from. She is the migrant who confirms British superiority not by critique, but by contrast. She enters public life not as a challenge to dominant narratives of race, immigration, or colonial history, but as an endorsement of them. Her name, her accent, her face, these are the surface signs of diversity. But her rhetoric serves to reassure, not to disrupt.

This dynamic is not new. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon examines the psychological and political condition of the colonised subject who becomes alienated from themselves in the attempt to approximate whiteness. Fanon warns of the spiritual violence inflicted upon those who must repudiate their origins to be accepted in the colonial centre. What Badenoch offers is a public performance of that alienation. She converts the pain of her past into the currency of present-day acceptance. Her suffering is useful, not as a site of healing, but as proof that she deserved to escape, and that others, still “trapped” in Sagamu or elsewhere, are to be pitied, not understood.

There is no room in her narrative for shared resilience. No acknowledgement of the many girls who passed through those same school gates and emerged with pride, dignity, and a sense of rootedness. No recognition of the teachers who, against all odds, continued to teach; of the girls who studied under flickering bulbs and still passed their WAEC exams; of the laughter that echoed through the halls despite infrastructural decay. Her version of Nigeria has no nuance. It exists only as a backdrop for her deliverance.

This is not to invalidate her experience. Pain is subjective, and she is entitled to hers. But once that experience is used not for introspection, but for political gain, once it is broadcast as representative of a nation, it must be held to account. To elevate oneself by diminishing one’s country of origin is not ambition; it is performance. And performance, particularly in politics, is rarely innocent.

Wole Soyinka once said, “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.” But what of those who speak, not to challenge tyranny, but to reinforce the narratives that make it possible? What of those who, rather than confront the imperial logic of the West, choose to become its poster children, confirming, through selective autobiography, that Africa is best left behind?

Badenoch has every right to critique her past. But to turn that critique into a weapon against her heritage, to narrate her girlhood as pathology, to erase the dignity of others who endured similar conditions, this is not the truth. It is branding. And branding, unlike truth, does not ask for accountability. It asks only for visibility, and applause.

In trying to escape Sagamu, Badenoch may find she has not entered freedom, but merely another kind of captivity. One where she must keep telling the same story, in the same bleak tones, to remain acceptable. The problem with disavowing your roots for the comfort of empire is that the empire will demand fresh proof, again and again, that you have not grown them back.

This is the textbook case of Stockholm Syndrome. You fall in love with your captors because you mistake survival for affection. You bow at the empire’s gate because it taught you to see home as shameful. You sip tea at a table that once whipped your ancestors and still say thank you. You romanticise the whip as a wand.

Kemi Badenoch, like Eniola Aluko, the former Chelsea player ingloriously dropped from England’s squad, has turned her success into a dagger aimed at her own heritage. Both parade the privileges of immigration while spitting on the soil that once nurtured them. In contrast, Rishi Sunak and Humza Yousaf wear the crown of Britishness with pride, not as an erasure of origin but as an embrace of it, uplifting their communities rather than distancing themselves from them. Badenoch and Aluko’s glitter may dazzle abroad, but at home, they stand as stark reminders of a diaspora torn between loyalty and survival. Their words do not merely echo across continents—they fracture the very identity that made their ascent possible.

And so, a final caution: when the applause fades, when the narrative is no longer convenient, when the empire turns its hunger elsewhere, what will remain? Will there be poetry left in the vein, or only silence?

Folorunso Fatai Adisa is a writer, communication specialist, and media scholar. He holds a master’s degree in media and communication from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He writes from the United Kingdom. He can be contacted via [email protected]