In Ayi Kwei Armah’s searing literary classic, Why Are We So Blest?, the Ghanaian chronicler dissects the tragic spectacle of a Black protagonist striving manfully to annihilate his own essence, desperate to dissolve himself into the blinding effulgence of the White Sun.
Decades after Armah penned that cautionary anatomy of self-erasure, his fictional pathology has walked off the page, donned a Savile Row suit, and assumed the leadership of the British Conservative Party.
Enter Kemi Badenoch—a living paradox who struts across the global stage like a modern-day Lady of Liberty, hoisting aloft the counterfeit torch of meritocratic freedom and post-racial opportunity.
Yet one need only drop the gaze to her ankles to witness the grim farce: her entire ontological being remains shackled in iron.
The dolorous clangour of historical chains has become a lullaby in her ears.
Her affliction transcends the clinical boundaries of Stockholm Syndrome; it is an aggressive, militant blancophilia—a public renunciation of self engineered to appease the ghosts of empire.
Frantz Fanon, in his clinical dissection of the colonized psyche, mapped the three-stage descent into this exact abyss.
First, the native is seized by an existential horror at his own supposedly benighted heritage.
Second, he violently amputates his roots, clinging desperately to the cultural breast of the conqueror.
Finally, tormented by psychosocial disorientation and a subconscious guilt neurosis over his betrayal of authenticity, he manufactures a fractured, hallucinatory worldview—an epistemic métissage that leaves him permanently unmoored, a cosmic flâneur wandering the corridors of alien power without a soul to call his own.
In Yoruba cosmology, there is an unflinching epithet for the progeny who turns against the hearth that birthed them, pointing toward their ancestral homestead with the contemptuous left hand: omo ale—the ungrateful bastard of history.
By publicly dismissing Britain’s obligation to apologize or pay reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, and by arguing that Britain should have opposed a United Nations resolution condemning the crime, Badenoch has elevated historical revisionism into a careerist art form.
She parrots the tired, self-exculpatory imperial catechism: that African kingdoms participated in the trade, that Britain led the abolition movement, and that the descendants of the enslaved ought simply to move on.
This threadbare sophistry collapses under elementary historical scrutiny.
As Edo State Commissioner for Education Washington Osifo incisively dismantled Badenoch’s distortion: participation is not authorship, and collaboration under the barrel of a musket is not creation.
African coastal middlemen did not design the chattel architecture of the Middle Passage; they did not build the floating dungeons of Liverpool and Bristol; they did not codify human beings into insurable cargo under British maritime law; nor did they construct the global racial hierarchy that systematically impoverished an entire continent to subsidize the Industrial Revolution.
To equate coerced peripheral complicity with the industrial, state-sponsored architects of human trafficking is the moral equivalent of blaming a hostage for a bank robbery.
Equally grotesque is the invocation of Britain’s 1807 and 1833 abolition acts as moral absolution. Applauding an arsonist for eventually turning off the hose after burning down an entire civilization—and then compensating the arsonist rather than the victims—is an insult to human intelligence.
When Britain abolished slavery, it did not pay a single farthing to the broken, traumatized millions whose backs built the empire.
Instead, the British Treasury borrowed £20 million—roughly 40 percent of its national budget—to compensate slave owners for their “lost property,” a debt so colossal that British taxpayers, including the descendants of the enslaved, only finished paying it off in 2015.
The British Empire was not forged on parliamentary etiquette; it was built on blood, sweat, and the pulverized ashes of Black bodies.
From the sugar plantations of Barbados and Jamaica to the looted bronzes of Benin and the extracted wealth of the Niger Delta, the architectural grandeur of London, Manchester, and Glasgow stands as a monument to centuries of uncompensated extraction.
Britain cannot scrub its blood-soaked ledger clean with selective amnesia or hollow diplomatic platitudes.
While recent overtures from British officials—such as Greater Manchester Mayor Andy Burnham’s suggestion that Britain might consider a formal apology while still slamming the door on financial reparations—signal a creeping realization that the moral debt cannot be outrun forever, an apology without restitution is merely an exercise in public relations vanity.
Against this backdrop of imperial evasion, the renewed Pan-African consensus championed by former Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St. Vincent and the Grenadines assumes historic urgency.
Speaking at the Creative Africa Nexus Weekend (CANEX WKND) and across international forums, Obasanjo and Gonsalves have stripped away diplomatic niceties to confront a foundational truth: global Africans—from the motherland to the Caribbean, the Americas, and the Pacific—are a single, indivisible people violently fractured by European greed.
Their demand for reparative justice is not a plea for Western charity; it is a sovereign demand for the settlement of an overdue historical invoice.
When Obasanjo and Gonsalves insist on the restoration of stolen heritage, debt cancellation, structural economic restitution, and the institutionalization of unvarnished African history in global curricula, they speak with the moral authority of elders who refuse to let the blood of the ancestors cry out in vain.
They recognize that the underdevelopment of Africa and the Caribbean is the direct, mathematical inverse of Western overdevelopment.
You cannot amputate a man’s limbs, steal his harvest for four hundred years, and then lecture him on self-reliance while sitting atop the stolen granary.
Yet history possesses a sharp, unforgiving irony.
London has long been haunted by the spawn of its conquered peripheries—subaltern figures rising from the ashes of empire to occupy the very fortresses that once plotted their subjugation.
Number 10 Downing Street may yet become Kemi Badenoch’s address in the not-too-distant future, even if merely as an optical curiosity during a season of British political anomie.
Empire, in its twilight decay, routinely recruits the children of the colonized to police the perimeter of its fading myths.
Long after the fleeting applause of Tory party conferences fades, and long after the blinding effulgence of the White Sun burns out, the historical record will remain etched in stone.
Between the dignified, unyielding demand for justice led by Obasanjo, Gonsalves, and the global Pan-African vanguard, and the tragic, self-negating performance of a native daughter who traded her ancestral birthright for a mess of imperial pottage, posterity will know precisely who stood on the side of human dignity—and who chose to rattle her chains in gratitude.
Erasmus Ikhide contributed this piece via: ikhideluckyerasmus@gmail.com