Let's Talk About Kemi Badenoch, the New Conservative Leader
The UK’s then-Secretary of State for Business and Trade, President of the Board of Trade, and Minister for Women and Equalities, Kemi Badenoch arrives for a cabinet meeting in Downing Street, London, on March 19, 2024 [File: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP]
Kemi Badenoch, the 44-year-old former software engineer, and Trade Minister ascended to the leadership of the UK Conservative Party—the first Black woman to lead a major British political party—comes at the end of a protracted contest triggered by the worst electoral defeat in the party’s history in July of 2024.
Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke was born in January 1980 in a relatively affluent suburb of London, as the daughter of a Nigerian doctor. Her mother was in the UK for medical treatment at the time. Badenoch spent much of her childhood in Nigeria and the United States, where her mother, a professor of physiology at the University of Lagos, frequently traveled for lecture tours.
Enough! Let's talk about Kemi Badenoch, the new Conservative Leader on the repercussions of slavery.
Op-ed: opinions, perspectivesThe rhetoric: The commentator's use of the same English they taught us to take down the British-Nigerian Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch on the repercussions of slavery. A female 'House Nigger', an 'Uncle Tom' married to a White!
