UK equalities minister has been criticised after leaked messages revealed she claimed not to 'care about colonialism', the Guardian reported.
Kemi Badenoch, who was recently given an additional portfolio in the Foreign Office, reportedly wrote: “I don’t care about colonialism because [I] know what we were doing before colonialism got there. They came in and just made a different bunch of winners and losers. There was never any concept of ‘rights’, so [the] people who lost out were old elites not everyday people.”
The leaked WhatsApp messages were revealed by VICE World News, and were posted on a group chat called Conservative Friends of Nigeria.
Funmi Adebayo, a former member of the WhatsApp group and the founder and chief executive of Olorun, which produces the Black Monologues podcasts, said she leaked the messages following Badenoch’s promotion, the Guardian report added.
Her portfolio now includes a junior ministerial position in the department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities.
Adebayo warned that “dangerous” comments such as Badenoch’s would drive black supporters away from the party and government.
She told the Guardian: “I’m no stranger to sitting opposite people who have completely different opinions to me … But we can connect as Nigerians, and be honest about the fact that colonialism had an impact on Nigeria and that it was awful. It wasn’t as simple as winners and losers; I think it’s such a crass way to respond. Those losers are people who died, and were murdered and raped.”
According to Adebayo, divisive comments like these are forcing people who genuinely wanted to create change to completely walk away from the years of work that they’ve done.
Simukai Chigudu, a professor of African politics at the University of Oxford, described the minister’s comments as ahistorical.
“At its most fundamental level, it doesn’t make any sense. How are we understanding and interpreting rights? Does she have sufficient knowledge of the culture and the languages, and the diverse social and political formations in different regions and groups throughout the continent?," he told the Guardian.
“The other thing is that it’s just not true. An awful lot of work by historians and anthropologists has shown different iterations, forms and concepts of what rights looked like going deep into the African past.”
Hakim Adi, professor of the history of Africa and the African diaspora at the University of Chichester, has said that the minister has a Eurocentric view of Africa.
"She imagines Africans had no conception of rights and the removal of the right to determine their own affairs was of no importance. On the contrary, Africans formulated the first modern conception of human rights. They gave their lives to rid Africa of colonial rule and today still struggle to remove all the vestiges of colonialism and foreign intervention, which remain a blight on the continent," Adi said.
Lord Karan Bilimoria speaks during the event
