By Mahmud Jega
Madam Olukemi Olufunto Adeleke Badenoch, who thinks of herself as British because she lives in Britain, is married to a kilt-wearing Scotsman, sits in the House of Commons, is Leader of the opposition Conservative Party and is busy rubbishing and denigrating her ancestral country in order to “belong” to the new country, could she spare a minute and learn a lesson from the Irish, many of whom are members of the party she allegedly leads? “Follows” is more like it because a leader is supposed to set the standards, rather than bend over backwards to bootlick the values of his supposed followers.
I will recommend to Kemi to read Margaret Mitchell’s all-time classic novel, Gone With The Wind. It was about the Southern American “civilization” of the mid-19th century, built around the affluence of huge cotton plantations, maintained by millions of Black slaves hauled in from across the Atlantic Ocean from West and Central Africa. This “civilization” evaporated with the American Civil War of 1861-65. The book itself was described as “the story of a civilization, a civilization gone with the wind.”
There was this interesting passage about Gerald O’Hara, father of Scarlett O’Hara, the novel’s central character. He owned the sprawling Tara cotton plantation in Georgia State, with hundreds of field and domestic slaves, of which he was very proud. One day he came galloping home on his favourite mare, only to find his beloved daughter, Scarlett sitting on the porch, heartbroken because she did not win the heart of her juvenile love, Ashley Wilkes. Mr. O’Hara was quite unhappy that any mundane thing should upset his daughter. Surveying the huge cotton fields and the extremely rich Southern American landscape which White settlers had snatched from Red Indians, he said to his daughter, “You, who is going to inherit the best land in the world!” Then he quickly added, “After County Meade, in the old country.”
Even though O’Hara himself or his ancestors fled from Ireland in order to escape a famine, and despite the splendor of his new life and his possession of the Tara plantation, he still had the presence of mind to place his ancestral home as the best land in the world. Ten years ago, when I was moving into my new house in Abuja, I surveyed the pleasant surroundings but, borrowing from Mr. O’Hara, I said, “This is the best house in the world! After Magatakarda’s house, in Jega.”
Now, County Meade, in Ireland, was the place that O’Hara fled from prior to the Great Irish Potato Famine of 1845-52, a period of mass starvation and disease that led to one million deaths, forced another one million Irishmen and women to flee to North America, and reduced the country’s population by one quarter. It was principally caused by the potato blight fungus Phytophthora infestans, which destroyed potato crops, the main food of the Irish. This fungus is here in Nigeria; I used to teach about it in Biology classes, even though it was not the immediate cause of Kemi’s flight to the UK. Luckily for the starving Irishmen, the US at the time was very welcoming of [European] immigrants in order to drive out the Red Indians and the hundreds of millions of bison and occupy their land. It even erected a statue on Liberty Island, leading into New York harbor, welcoming immigrants with the words, “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. Send these the homeless, tempest tossed, to me…” When President Donald Trump, who is of German ancestry, takes charge from January next year, he might pull down the Statue of Liberty and possibly throw the Irish back whence they came from.
Madam Kemi, before you embarked on a serial denigration of your ancestral homeland in order to “belong” to the new home, did you sit down to reflect why the Tories, who were thrown out of power in British general elections last July, decided to make you, of all people, to be their old party’s leader? This young, black, first-generation immigrant, inexperienced, talk-before-you think gate crasher into Conservative values, asked to occupy the chair on which Benjamin Disraeli, Arthur Balfour, Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden, Harold McMillan, Alec Douglas-Home, Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher, John Major, David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson and more recently, Rishi Sunak once sat, with nothing of the charisma or the self-esteem?
Kemi Badenoch’s absolute fascination with the House that the British Built on their small island is understandable, but that is because she has no knowledge at all of the very heavy price that others paid in order for the Brits to build this island. At one time Britain had one quarter of the entire human population under its imperial boot. Hundreds of thousands of ships ferried riches “more than the mind can picture,” to borrow from Old Major’s song in Animal Farm, to Britain from all the countries of the far-flung empire, including Africa, Caribbeans, South America, Asia, Arabia, West Indies and the Pacific Islands. Even IBM computers cannot quantify the wealth that left colonial India, the so-called “Crown Jewel of the British Empire,” and landed on British shores.
Why are so many people around the world not as fascinated as Madam Kemi is with the British homeland? The American Red Indians, Australian Aboriginals, tens of millions of African slaves that were shipped to work in slave plantations, the Kenyans who suffered under the colonial State of Emergency in order to suppress the Mau Mau; the Southern Rhodesians who suffered under Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence [UDI] with British connivance; not to mention South African blacks, who endured five decades of Apartheid rule and centuries of racial discrimination, all do not have Madam Kemi’s fascination with the British Isles.
My recently deceased Mum once told me a story, that during the Second World War in the 1940s, many young men in the village where she grew up were drafted into the colonial British Army and sent off to fight the Japanese in Burma. Many of them never returned. In addition, Native Authority officials went round all the villages, urging farmers to donate groundnuts and other cash crops to assist the British war effort. Hundreds of thousands of tones from our back-breaking labour went to assist in a fight that did not really concern us. Since we have helped the British to escape the clutches of Adolf Hitler, they should please refund to us the cost of our groundnuts and other produce, instead of granting safe haven to our own misguided daughter to insult us from afar. When Northern Nigeria was donating groundnuts to help save the Brits from Hitler, why didn’t they reject it and say it was from Boko Haram territory? Are they sure that it is not the farm produce they looted from our lands that set the stage for Boko Haram and bandits to roam over this place?
Mrs. Badenoch is so grateful because she has risen to a position in an opposition political party, and she feels on top of the world. Is she the first person from the Third World, from Africa or even from Nigeria that ever rose to an exalted position on the world, not just a British, stage? During our early primary school days, we endlessly heard the name of U Thant in the BBC World News, because of the then raging Vietnam War. We got the impression in our young minds that he was the ruler of the world. I later came to realise that this Burmese diplomat was Secretary General of the United Nations. His home country Burma, then under Ne Win, subsequently under the Senior General Shan Shwe and even today under General Min Aung Hlaing, is not the most pleasant of countries but U Thant, prominent that he was, never disowned Burma or said he belonged to Bamar ethnic group, or that he had nothing in common with the Rohingyas of western Burma, most of whom are in exile today in Bangladesh.
The other sons and daughters of the Third World who rose to prominence on the world stage, did they ever denigrate their homelands? When Boutros Boutros-Ghali became Secretary General of the United Nations, did he ever disown Egypt because Muslim Brotherhood militants sometimes exploded bombs in the Sinai? Did Kofi Anan ever disown Ghana because he served a long tenure as UN Secretary General? Did Javier Perez De Cuellar ever lampoon Peru? What about Ban Ki-moon; did he disown his native South Korea for fear that North Korea may one day send a million troops across the DMZ?
Other Nigerians who rose to prominence on the international stage, Adebayo Adedeji as Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa; Emeka Anyaoku as Secretary General of Commonwealth of Nations; Akinwunmi Adesina who is President of the Africa Development Bank; Tijjani Mohamed-Bande who was President of the UN General Assembly; Amina Mohamed who is Deputy Secerary General of the United Nations and Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala who is Director General of the World Trade Organisation, positions all more exalted than Madam Kemi’s, which one of them lampooned Nigeria in order to “belong” to his/her new circle?
Madam Kemi said she is Yoruba and has nothing in common with Northern Nigeria, the home of Boko Haram. How come she forgot that when she returned to Britain in 1996, “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland had raged for 28 years and bombs planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army [IRA] were exploding in British city street corners?
What is Leader of a British opposition party when the son of an African, Barack Obama, rose to become President of the United States? Even though his mother was a lily-White woman from Kansas, did Obama ever disown Kenya, from where his father went to the US as a student? He must have learnt something from his father, who returned home after his studies and did not elope, despite marrying a White woman. Rather than disown his ancestry, President Obama actually flaunted it. In his first week in the White House, he introduced to reporters a pet dog that he just procured. The puppy was mixed breed, so Obama said, “It is a mutt, like me.”
Not only them. When Iosif Vissarionovich Djugashvili, alias Stalin, was General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party and leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 to 1953, did he ever disown his tiny native Georgia in order to ingratiate himself with Russia, the dominant partner in the Soviet Union? When Josif Broz Tito, who was half Croat and half Slovene, became President of Yugoslavia, did he ever disown his homeland in order to gain acceptance from Serbs, who dominated the country?
Look, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933 and later rose to become Der Fuehrer, he wasn’t even a German but an Austrian, son of the small Austrian Customs officer Alois Schicklgruber. Did he ever deny Austria in order gain acceptance from aristocratic Prussian Generals and Junkers?
