Badenoch: A powerful British leader on the wrong side of history

THE EDITOR, Madam:

The newly elected British conservative party leader, Kemi Badenoch, is a 44-year-old Black woman. Based on race, this represents a stunning paradigm shift on several levels.

Firstly, she is young and she is from a race which has been deeply marginalised in a country deeply rooted in trading in the bodies of Badenoch’s ancestors.

Further, who would have dreamt that a black woman could have risen to the top in Britain’s Conservative party, whose former head was also a fairly young Indian man.

Truth in British politics has become stranger than fiction. But as I rose to hail this rise of a Black woman, I was pushed back in my seat by her conservative utterances on our claim for Reparations for Transatlantic Chattel Slavery (TACS) from Britain.

She said in an interview, before a mainly white audience, that we need to stop looking in the past, but rather “we need to talk about the future”. She said the call for reparations is an attempt “...to use guilt to try and exploit the UK”.

I was alarmingly embarrassed that falling from her lips was that the former colonised countries’ claim for compensation for slavery was “a scam, don’t fall for it”.

She is no doubt a product of the British education system. This miseducation became apparent when she argued that historically, Britain did “many amazing things”, one of which is that it “ended the transatlantic slave trade”.

Now, tell me, to end a four-century criminal enterprise, classified as a ‘crime against humanity’, is now an act to celebrate?

Listening to her one would have been led to believe that it was another country which was engaged in slavery when the British – as was done to Hitler – invaded the said slave-owning country and liberated the enslaved, thereby ending the four-century long period of man’s greatest mistreatment of man.

Her white interviewer did make the correct observation when he remarked “those who support reparations may find your arguments as a black woman hard to understand”.

Recall that when Cameron came here in 2015, he did, like Badenoch, read the very same Conservative script, arguing that we should not “peer into the past”. The Conservative PM Cameron conveniently forgot that he had travelled to Jerusalem in March 2014 the previous year where he laid a wreath at the ceremony in the “Hall of Remembrance” in honour of the six million Jews who perished in the holocaust.

The truth is that Cameron’s first cousin, six times removed, a Mr Duff who was the son of one of Cameron’s great-grand uncles, the second Earl of Fife, was awarded £4,101 – equivalent to more than £3 million today – to compensate him for the 202 slaves he forfeited on the Grange sugar estate in Jamaica.

It is sad that Badenoch, a Black woman, has aligned herself with the heirs of our enslavers and is now a powerful British leader on the wrong side of history, giving support to those who want us to “forget and move on”.

BERT SAMUELS

Pan-Africanist Attorney-at-Law