Symbolic Black British Nigerian Identity Image
A Coffee Spilling Headline?
The headline provocatively screamed: “Kemi Badenoch says she no longer sees herself as Nigerian despite upbringing.”
But buried within the reporting, was the actual quote that told a far more nuanced story. In comments attributed to her in the guardian on the 1st August 2025, in its publication and also reported widely in various printed and TV, social media outlets, the caption and headline were perhaps more gripping by the detail of her apparent verbatim attributed quote.
“I’m Nigerian through ancestry, by birth, despite not being born there because of my parents, but by identity I’m not really,” Badenoch had said. “But home is where my now family is, and my now family is my children, it’s my husband and my brother and his children, in-laws.”
When I read the headline stating that Kemi Badenoch “no longer sees herself as Nigerian despite upbringing,”⁵ or words to that effect and meaning, I couldn’t help but think they’d missed the point entirely. What the Conservative leader and main opposition leader actually described in her interview on the Rosebud podcast with Gyles Brandreth⁶ wasn’t a rejection of her heritage but something far more universal and human.
While Tebbit questioned the loyalty of those who maintained emotional connections to their heritage countries, The Guardian now seems to question the authenticity of someone who has clearly chosen where to build their primary allegiance. Both approaches miss the nuanced reality of modern belonging.
Badenoch’s words will resonate with millions around the world navigating the complex terrain of modern identity. “I’m Nigerian through ancestry, by birth, despite not being born there because of my parents, but by identity I’m not really,” she said on the podcast. “But home is where my now family is, and my now family is my children, it’s my husband and my brother and his children, in-laws. The Conservative party is very much part of my family, my extended family, I call it.”⁸
This isn’t controversial, it’s normal. It’s the reality for the Chinese-American doctor in California whose heart belongs where her children go to school, not where her grandparents were born. It’s the story of the Pakistani engineer in Toronto who loves his heritage but calls Canada home because that’s where he built his life. It’s the experience of the Irish descendant in Australia, the Indian family in London, the Polish community in Chicago.
Is Identity Binary?
The Guardian’s framing suggests Badenoch had to choose between being Nigerian or British, as if identity were a zero-sum game. But her actual words reveal something more sophisticated: the recognition that ancestry, cultural connection, and home can exist on different planes.
She explicitly acknowledges knowing Nigeria “very well,” having “a lot of family there,” and being “very interested in what happens there.” This isn’t rejection, it’s the mature acknowledgment that you can honor your roots while recognizing where your primary allegiances and daily life actually lie.
Obama, Powell and Rice
This complexity of identity and belonging isn’t unique to Badenoch. Consider how other prominent Black political figures have navigated similar terrain. Barack Obama, despite his Kenyan father and strong personal connections to Kenya, built his political identity entirely around his American experience and allegiances. When questioned about his heritage during his presidency, he consistently emphasized his American identity while honoring his complex background.
Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell, both from different generational and political perspectives, demonstrated how Black Americans can fully embrace American identity while maintaining awareness of their heritage.
Powell “didn’t take his success for granted but believed that his life and all that he achieved were an affirmation of America’s possibilities.”
Research notes that “Neither Powell nor Rice consciously allowed their racial identity” to define their policy positions, yet they were still subject to intense scrutiny about their racial loyalty that white politicians rarely face.
Even more contemporary figures like Candace Owens face similar questions about authentic Black identity when their political positions diverge from expected norms.
Critics argue that “blacks in high positions such as Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice have ceased to present and represent black grievances, and have instead adopted a white perspective toward politics”, yet this criticism itself reveals the impossible bind facing Black political figures who must constantly justify their complex identities.
Badenoch’s situation mirrors these dynamics but adds another layer: she’s navigating not just racial identity within one country, but transnational belonging across continents. Like Obama’s navigation of his Kenyan heritage and American identity, or Rice and Powell’s embrace of American values while acknowledging their African American experience, Badenoch is articulating where her primary emotional and political home lies while respecting her ancestral connections.
Consider the billions of people worldwide who maintain this exact balance: respecting their heritage while knowing their heart belongs where they’ve chosen to build their adult lives.
The Italian-Americans who visit Sicily but raise their children in New York. The Mexican families in Texas who celebrate their culture but see America as home. The Lebanese diaspora in Brazil who love their ancestral homeland but are thoroughly Brazilian.
Building a Belonging
What makes Badenoch’s comments particularly striking is her inclusion of the Conservative Party as part of her “extended family.”
This reveals someone who has built deep institutional and emotional ties in Britain, the kind of belonging that goes beyond geography or even blood relations to encompass chosen community and shared purpose.
Kemi the human person
Born in Wimbledon to Nigerian Yoruba parents, Olufemi “Femi” Adegoke and Feyi Adegoke, Badenoch’s early life spanned continents and cultures.⁹ Her father was a general practitioner running his clinic in Lagos, while her mother was a physiology professor whose work took the family between Nigeria and the United States.¹⁰ “My parents were married for 45 years before my father passed away. It was in a middle-class, well-educated family. And that really shaped me because when I moved to this country, I became working class. I changed class and I had to work to get back to where I was,” she reflected.¹¹
Her father, who died in February 2022, was particularly supportive of her political ambitions. “It was my dad who was excited about me becoming a politician,” she said.¹² Now married to Hamish Badenoch, an investment banker, since 2012, she is a mother to three children born in 2013, 2017, and 2019.¹³
The couple has deliberately kept their family life private, with Hamish taking the lead on day-to-day parenting. “My husband does way more than I do because his job isn’t weird like mine is. He’s the one who’s in all the parents’ WhatsApp groups,” she has noted.¹⁴
Badenoch’s educational and professional achievements themselves speak to this deep integration. She studied Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Sussex, completing her MEng in 2003, and went on to study law at Birkbeck, gaining her LLB in 2009.¹⁵ After graduating, she worked for Logica as a software engineer, claiming she was “once the only woman on a building site with 300 men!” before moving to the Royal Bank of Scotland as a system analyst and pursuing a career in banking.¹⁶
She has been the Member of Parliament for North West Essex since 2017 and was re-elected in July 2024, currently serving as Leader of HM Official Opposition and Leader of the Conservative Party.¹⁷
Her ministerial career included roles as Secretary of State for Business and Trade, Secretary of State for International Trade, Minister for Women and Equalities, and Minister of State at various departments.¹⁸ As a relatively young mother of three, she has become the first Black leader of the opposition in UK history. These are no simple feats in any political system, requiring sustained engagement, coalition-building, and institutional knowledge that comes from genuine belonging rather than superficial attachment.
Yes, she has expressed views that many find controversial or factually questionable, particularly her comments about colonialism. In leaked WhatsApp messages, Badenoch stated that colonialism “just made a different bunch of winners and losers” on the African continent and that prior to colonisation, “There was never any concept of ‘rights’, so [the] people who lost out were old elites; not everyday people”.¹⁹
In a 2024 speech, she reportedly said that: “It worries me when I hear people talk about wealth and success in the UK as being down to colonialism or imperialism or white privilege or whatever.”²⁰
However, these statements require careful fact-checking against scholarly evidence. Research shows that “the immense economic inequality we observe in the world today is the path-dependent outcome of a multitude of historical processes, one of the most important of which has been European colonialism”, directly contradicting her dismissive stance.²¹
Academic studies examining “how colonial rule and African actions during the colonial period affected the resources and institutional settings for subsequent economic development south of the Sahara” demonstrate that colonial impacts were far more complex and damaging than her “different winners and losers” characterization suggests.²²
While some research notes that “most African countries saw steadily rising incomes over the colonial period relative to the base year 1885” and that “Africans were able to reap the benefits of the introduction of railways and mining technology”, this narrow economic framing ignores the broader institutional, social, and psychological damage.²³ Colonial control “forced profound changes in the operation of labour and land markets” that disrupted traditional systems and created lasting inequalities.²⁴
The intergenerational effects extend far beyond Africa. Research shows that “African Americans experience much higher rates of poverty, unemployment, and negative health outcomes compared to Whites in the US” and that “colonialism underlies the commodification of health care in the United States and continues to harm well-being among Black Americans”.²⁵
Studies reveal that “present-day economic disparities between Black and White Americans are rooted in their ancestral histories, revealing that families enslaved until the Civil War are significantly more disadvantaged than those freed earlier”.²⁶
The evidence shows that “from the brutal exploitation of Africans during slavery, to systematic oppression in the Jim Crow South, to today’s institutionalized racism—apparent in disparate access to and outcomes in education, health care, jobs, housing, and criminal justice—government policy has created or maintained” these disparities.²⁷ International bodies recognize that “the scourge of slavery has left a painful legacy through persisting inequities, as well as marginalization, dehumanization and brutality”.²⁸
Her claim that there was “never any concept of ‘rights'” before colonialism is particularly problematic, as it perpetuates colonial narratives that justified domination by portraying African societies as lacking sophisticated governance systems. Many African societies had complex legal and social systems that colonial powers deliberately dismantled.
Even these controversial stances often contain more nuance than initial headlines suggest, and reflect perspectives common within right-wing political thought, whether one agrees with them or not. Conservative publications like History Reclaimed have defended her comments, arguing “She has a far better grasp of history than her critics.”²⁹
While that may or not be the case, scholarly consensus appears to contradict her position on colonialism’s minimal impact.
It’s also arguable that the relentless scrutiny she faces, including the immediate leap to sensationalist interpretations of her identity comments, reflects a standard that would not be subjected to a mainstream white politician expressing similar views about their own complex heritage and sense of home.
Her firm views, whilst expressed strongly, are likely why she has risen to lead a major political party. Yet there seems to be little agency or nuance granted to her identity as a visibly Black British woman of African-Nigerian descent.
This too reflects a global reality. Home isn’t just where you were born or where your ancestors came from, it’s where you’ve invested your adult energy, where you’ve built relationships, where you’ve chosen to contribute to society. For Badenoch, that’s clearly Britain and the Conservative movement within it.
What Research indicates
What Badenoch described isn’t just common, it’s well-documented in academic literature. Bloemraad (2004) notes that citizenship is “highly complex because it is so integrally linked to both personal identity and the state” and involves “transnational belonging” that defies simple categorization.¹¹
Research on transnational identity by Vertovec (2001) shows people regularly “identified with both their ancestral homeland and the country where they grew up, felt a sense of belonging to both places and engaged in practices across the borders”.¹²
Studies of migrants by Bauböck (2003) consistently find that “self-identification processes take place alongside quests to feel more secure, and socially included” and that people “negotiate their own place” through “transnational practices and identifications”.¹³ This isn’t aberrant behavior, it’s how millions of people naturally navigate complex belonging in our interconnected world.
Or Does the The Law Gets It?
The legal framework already acknowledges what Badenoch articulated. International law scholars argue that dual citizenship has become “an unexceptional status in the wake of globalization”, while human rights law increasingly recognizes “the right to citizenship” as encompassing complex questions of “acquisition, loss and” multiple forms of belonging.¹⁴
People holding multiple citizenship are “generally, entitled to the rights of citizenship in each country whose citizenship they are holding” but may also choose where to focus their primary allegiances. International law doesn’t require emotional or cultural uniformity, it recognizes that legal status and personal belonging can operate on different levels.
Society Moves Forward
Academic study of “diasporic identities” has long recognized this as “a field of academic study, political debate and public controversy”, but the scholarly consensus has moved toward accepting complex, layered identities as normal rather than problematic. Research on transnationalism by Smith & Guarnizo (1998) shows it’s “often associated with globalisation, migration, cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism, diaspora” and has “an inner processual and in-becoming character”, meaning it’s inherently fluid and evolving.¹⁵
When Good Papers Go ‘Tabloidy’
Imagine if The Guardian had chosen a different angle: “Badenoch Explains Where She Calls Home After Building Life in Britain” or “Conservative Leader Reflects on Complex Identity Shared by Millions Worldwide.” These headlines would have captured the same story while recognizing the universal nature of her experience rather than making it sound like an abandonment.
The current headline reduces a nuanced discussion of belonging to a simple narrative of rejection. It misses the millions of readers who would have nodded in recognition at Badenoch’s words, seeing their own experience reflected back at them.
This characterization by The Guardian misstates and misrepresents her quite modern position, one shared by millions, if not billions, of families of all racial backgrounds across the world, whether they’ve chosen to call home Africa, Turkey, Dubai, America, or Europe.
Of all races and nationalities.
This is an inward-looking, typical “gotcha” alarmist and sensationalist headline with little substance. The Guardian, often a better paper than many others, went tabloid on this occasion. It’s arguable that because she is a visibly Black British woman of African-Nigerian descent, there is no agency or nuance granted to her complex identity, a standard that reveals more about media expectations than about her actual position.
The Real Global Story
Badenoch’s comments should spark a broader conversation about how we discuss identity in our interconnected world, but that conversation should be informed by decades of research showing this is normal human behavior. As millions of people live lives that span continents, cultures, and generations, the old categories of “where you’re from” become increasingly inadequate.
Her experience of moving to Britain at 16, building a family and career there, and eventually leading a major political party as the main opposition leader of the Conservative Party while maintaining connections to Nigeria represents one version of a story being lived by countless people worldwide. It’s the human story of the 21st century, complex, layered, and defying simple categorization.
The statistics support the universality of this experience. In England and Wales alone, dual citizenship increased dramatically from 31,300 in 2011 to 147,000 in 2021, while 43% of people born abroad in the UK said they were UK citizens.
Globally, the picture is even more striking: just one-third of countries allowed dual citizenship in 1960 compared with 75% in 2019, and by 2020, 76 percent of countries maintain a tolerant approach towards dual citizenship.¹⁶
Perhaps, the real story here isn’t that a politician has distanced herself from her heritage. It’s that she’s articulated something millions of people understand instinctively and that scholars, legal experts, and civil society organizations have long recognized as legitimate: that home is where you build your life, raise your family, and invest your future, regardless of where your story began.
Perhaps it’s time for all of us in the media coverage to catch up with this scholarly and legal reality, rather than forcing complex human experiences into headlines that obscure more than they reveal. Badenoch’s comments weren’t controversial, per se but reflect the battles of diaspora identity across racial backgrounds. Whether by choice, pomp, circumstance or nature.
The holistic nuance about the interwoven nature of modern belonging, backed by decades of research and legal recognition, is exactly what the global conversation about identity requires not screaming headlines that musk that complexity
