Understanding Kemi Badenoch

There are usually multiple categories of diasporic citizens. Three are, however, easier to identify. The first are those who express love for their origin, are concerned about its well-being, and directly or indirectly participate in peace, stability, and progress matters. The second group is those indifferent, perhaps because they have integrated into the host society, hardly imagining returning, and are only concerned with looking forward to their place of residence. The third are those who have also successfully integrated and resent their origin. British Conservative Party leader, Mrs. Kemi Badenoch is an obvious example. She has consistently pilloried Nigeria, her original country, using extreme words, running against the traditional diplomatic practice of respect for peoples and sovereignties. It is also against a traditional British culture of decorum and reverence for the other.

She is not, however, the first to be unkind to origin. Russian Alexander Pushkin reportedly had a maternal African ancestry, but the poet and his family hate to be associated with that heritage. US Ralph Ellison also did not fancy his African lineage, just as his compatriot, Langston Hughes, once preferred the status of a Mexican immigrant to an African connection. Haiti’s Jean-Jacques Dessalines preferred the Western Culture far more than his African extraction. Legendary author, psychiatrist, and nationalist writer Franz Fanon once thought the French culture deserved prioritisation above that of his Martinique, Caribbean source. How about the legendary singer, Micheal Jackson? Part of the controversies he courted was the alteration of his sheath to distance himself from Blackness.

Badenoch is, therefore, simply enlisting her name on this list further to the constant contestation, construction, and communication of diasporic identities. These identities are repetitively in flux, mutating over time across spaces and in paces determined by individual citizens or circumstances. These circumstances are often liminal, one of being neither here nor there, described by Paul Gilroy as “double consciousness” Sitting in the middle, the first category of citizens is graceful, looking backwards with regrets and deliberately concerned about improving origin through remittances, advocacy, and transference of knowledge, considering the new exposures they would have learned.

From this liminal, threshold, or transitory space, the indifferent citizens keep cool in the comfort of relative stability, hardly looking backwards or forward like the famed Greek Idol, Janus. Badenoch’s class of diasporic citizens would have integrated, are now resentful of origin, and are open about it. Nevertheless, the challenge for them is the mathematics of history and biology. This mathematics is stubborn, organic, and hardly alterable. They are reflected in the changelessness of their roots and routes, their phenotype and preliminary associations, which are irreconstructible.

Provocative as their tirades on origin might be, they often should not be blamed, even though the temptation to do so is high. First, the average citizen living in the distance and resenting origin is hardly a migrant. They are not those who moved to look towards economic benefits, hoping to leverage the relative prosperity in the host society and then return to improved living with proceeds from abroad.

Those who usually resent their origin are often diasporic, involving the more settled community of people in a different society, as opposed to those resettling for temporary reasons, primarily economic, with less sense of integration. Many diasporic citizens, therefore, suffer from a complex sense of belonging, including the implausibility of return and/or the overt or covert challenges of integration despite portrayals to the contrary. Resentment becomes a mechanism for coping, maintaining emotional stability, and enhancing sustainability. Feeling absent from origin and undergoing subtle exclusion from the host society (which might be open depending on the system’s disposition to multiculturalism), some individuals consciously or unconsciously evolved mechanisms to deal with the stress of reductive recognitions, which patriots or nationalists in origin might consider offensive.

Second, diasporic citizens are constantly in a crisis of identity, a transformative process trending over interactions with different cultures, possibly leading to the pressure to stick to the one at hand at the expense of the one before. Third is misplaced guilt through the frustration of watching origin’s continuous incompatibility with the host society and the slew of disappointing actions of leaders, now resulting in outright, outward bitterness. Fourth, resentment is arguably helpful in managing the strain, stress, and trauma of dislocation, as well as the continuous negative portrayal of origin on the global stage, given the quest of some affected citizens for emotional and psychological restitution.

Fifth is the question of pride and prestige, leading resenting citizens to think they should not be associated with a past dominated by narratives of oppression and a disillusioning present, where anxiety fills the imagination of the future.  There could be many more reasons, like the quest for personal growth, where the citizens think associating with origin will be an obstacle; limited help from origin, making them think it is of no value and should not be honoured in any way; and of course, the question of choice, an individuated inclination to create own pathway.

Whatever the cause, and as painful as their actions might be, Governments worldwide have adopted a slew of methods to manage resentment. Resentments are, therefore, not to be resolved through aggression or confrontation. Granted that private citizens or civil society members have the liberty to respond how they want, governments should be elevated in their response, if at all.

Seeking engagement, reassurance of love towards engendering belonging, given the diasporic state of longing, and direct measures at resolving criticisms are often more helpful. If possible, diasporic citizens are to be courted for being dislocated in the first instance and for not being classed as expatriates, investors, foreign partners, and discoverers like the many Westerners populating and sometimes exploiting nations of the South. Nigerian government thought rightly in the direction of benefiting from them, setting up the Nigerian in Diaspora Commission (NIDCOM), but the poorly funded organisation, with disjointed office space, mainly surviving because of the charisma of its present chairman, Hon. Abike Dabiri-Erewa, can hardly compare with the feats of the Ministry of Overseas Indian Affairs-an opposite number.

We have also seen reconciliation with diasporic citizens in Chile, South Korea, Ireland, and Rwanda, while the Philippines has been directly concerned about their welfare. Kenya is interested in growing their voting rights, while Ghana rekindled their imaginations with the Year of Return in 2019. The Israeli law of Return is more compelling, exemplifying their status as a classical diaspora. At the same time, Ethiopia has worked on its diasporas through investment initiatives, in addition to the example of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which emphasises reintegration and healing. Italy was once generous with its citizenship to several generations of absent citizens, just as South Korea, Mexico, and Senegal have been concerted to woo diasporas.

Governments have also been known to identify outstanding diasporic citizens for one-on-one consultation, given their substantial influence. While the achievements of these few could make them outspokenly critical, governments would instead tow the diplomatic part as the bigger party in a presumed duel. Granted that Nigeria has, through NIDCOM, registered some presence, more is still to be done, now that Badenoch is still knocking on the nation’s past if to negotiate her present path, further to the hyper-activity of the diasporic being and becoming.

Adeniyi, a professor of diasporic communication, is the Dean of the School of Postgraduate Studies at Baze University in Abuja.