By Sam Omatseye
Kemi Badenoch may need to beware of the pratfall ahead. It is what hubris breeds. Rarely is a woman accused of hubris, perhaps a few like Cleopatra. Hubris is often a male venom because women seldom rise to the sort of power that invokes celestial self-confidence.
In this regard, Badenoch is a class apart. Many don’t want a rehash of Badenoch’s rhetorics without restraint, her Nigerian putdowns, her repudiation of the land of her birth. Yet, as the cleric Bishop Kukah has eloquently written in a recent essay, we must credit her ability to traverse a country of a pedigree that enslaved blacks and built a civilization on the backs of the African race.
She thinks she was plucked from the sky, a dizzy genius of self-manufacture. She does not seem, in her habits and attitude, to know gratitude to history, to go down in genuflection to the monuments that made her possible.
She is not the first to so rise. We have known blacks, especially in the United States, who either star as inspiration for others or, for most part, take a cue from the words of an unlikely hero of humility: Winston Churchill. He said, “it was the people who had the courage of a lion, I simply had the luck to give it roar.”
Obama acknowledged the exploits of centuries of blood and tears, of white butchery and blacks squelching through the mud bowed by lashes. Serena nods to Arthur Ashe. Coco Gauff thanks Serena. In Britain, Formula One Lewis Hamilton thanks all of them before him, especially in the U.S. but not without knowing that you can’t be a pioneer without the collective sacrifices of little people in little episodes. Those who protested in homes, in farms, on the plantations, like Bertha Mason, who screamed anonymously in the attic in Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre. Or Mansfield’s Judgment of 1772 in favour of James Somerset, a slave who would not toil in the plantations outside England. Or our own John Fashanu, or even a sleek Arsenal star Bukayo Saka, whose Nigerian name, unlike Kemi’s, rankles the British soul soothingly.
Badenoch should remember that a few other Nigerians and African names, too many to say, have been in British politics, and have made names like hers not too shabby for the ear and sensibility of the British. To refer to Churchill again, “to each, there comes in their lifetime a special moment when they are figuratively tapped on the shoulder and offered a chance to do a special thing.”
As Nixon wrote in his memoirs, “history affects us more than we affect history.” War made Roosevelt, slavery minted Lincoln, suffering sainted Mother Theresa, apartheid gave us Mandela. We have to be humble before history. We are not as great as we think we are. History is like what the playwright Arthur Schopenhauer describes willpower, as “a strong blind man who carries a lame man who can see.”
A few examples of blacks who rose by discounting their fellow blacks should help Kemi. They are Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson. Woods is the best golfer whoever lived, even if he has not clobbered as many majors as Jack Niclaus’ 18. When his stardom lit its first tinder, he had a meeting with existing stars of his colour, especially Jordan. They asked him to stay away from politics, and focus on golf. Retreating from controversy would mount up the dollar deals, and he did. When he was asked in Missouri about a question, he replied, “I am a golfer.” He became a darling of all. Blacks and whites embraced him.
Then came the fall that exposed his many peccadilloes. The whites turned their backs on him, and it was the blacks, who he would never marry, who would never date, he never identified with that gave him succour in that painful hour. It was his time of solitude. Michael Jackson became so white that he wanted to look white. Then he had troubles of his own, and he fell into accusations of sexual perversion. He opened up in a new album asserting, to some as an exaggeration, that they -white- “don’t care about us.”
It is the sort of trap Badenoch has to avoid. He is the first to become the leader of a major political party. It is not just a major political party, but the most organized political party in history. It is the oldest in history. It is also the most successful having gobbled up power two-thirds of the time. Before they were called Conservatives, they have been a loose group known as Tories since the third quarter of the 17th century. Most notably it was the party of slavery and monarchism. It was in the aftermath of the Reform Act in the 19th Century that it became organized fully as the Conservative Party. It is no mean task that Badenoch sits on top of story of the Tories.
It does not call for vanity but sanity. Kemi does not act like a politician of that stripe. He should learn, too, that his party has a history of intolerance for bumbling leaders, white or black. That explains its success. Kemi should be wary, lest she becomes as black as a blip of history. If she wants to lead the party to victory, and become its first black prime minister, she has to remodel her character. Her personality is helping her today. But she needs character more.
When Vice President Kashim Shettima says she could remove her name as Kemi, we suddenly saw her appealing to her Yoruba roots. That is not only foolish but sophomoric. Yoruba has always been Nigerian since she was born. Her biography shows she grew up in the Southwest where she had all the experience she derides. So, trying to separate Yoruba from Nigeria is vacuous. A president – who is Yoruba – is today fighting Boko Haram, and most Nigerians, North or South, abhor that group.
She should beware of what some call Coconut – black outside, white inside. Or else, we might not call her Oluwakemi but Oyinbokemi, a name she seems to propagate with her acts. Kemi means take care of me.
Culled from The Nation
