The real Kemi: what everyone gets wrong about the Tory leader
But this was Nigeria, where you learned early which battles were worth fighting and which weren't. Making a fuss about cheating meant making enemies. Kemi stood up anyway. 'I studied for this exam,' she said, loud enough for everyone to hear, 'and this guy is here cheating.'
The boy was expelled. Word spread around the entire school and Kemi spent the rest of the term as a curiosity in her school. Who was this girl? Many thought her reckless; someone who invited hostility, possibly even violence.
I heard from others that what was most odd was that Kemi didn't seem to care. She was so convinced that she had told the truth and done the right thing; her strict Methodist upbringing provided her with a thick skin. In a country where getting by often meant looking the other way, she had refused to look away.
It's tempting to see this as the origin story of a future Conservative leader, but the truth is more complicated. Had she lived to adulthood in Nigeria, that fierce sense of right and wrong might have been worn down by the daily grind of compromise that living there demands.
Standing out in the crowd in an African country is dangerous, and especially bad for women. There are rules to be followed. When to speak, what to like, what to wear, who to marry. The choice is to follow the rules or to be an outcast.
The year she stood up in her classroom against injustice – 1995 – Nigeria was kicked out of the Commonwealth for human rights abuses; the nation she and I grew up in was marked by economic upheaval, military dictatorship and deep-seated corruption.
Where Nigeria might have demanded compromise, Britain simply let her be. In Lagos, standing up to a cheater had made her an outlier; in London, it would have made her a hero. The very qualities that marked her as difficult in one place made her formidable in another.
Those of us who have known her over the years can trace a clear line from the girl who refused to look away in that sweltering classroom to the woman who still refuses to look away today as leader of the Conservative Party.
That freedom is why she loves Britain with a passion that baffles the Left, who cannot conceive of her as anything but a puppet of Right-wing interests. She confounds their tidy expectations of what a black woman should think, say, or aspire to. They believe she doesn't know her place. According to their world view, Britain is a bastion of white supremacy and racial inequality, and a black woman must unequivocally denounce the country. Kemi is an oddball to them.
Now, as Conservative leader, she faces the mirror image of this contempt from some on the fringes of the Right: the white supremacists, for instance, who denounce her online as a 'diversity hire', a plant by the WEF, the Jews, or whatever conspiracy is trending that week.
They, too, believe she doesn't know her place. Both extremes share the same fundamental error – they cannot fathom that her place is exactly where she chooses to stand.
Kemi and I are good friends. But we could not be more different. I prefer to mind my own business and I'd sooner jump off a bridge than run the gauntlet of British politics. Yet in all the years I've known her, I've come to recognise that we share something fundamental: we both found in Britain a place that would accommodate who we are without judgement, yet still possess a set of customs and values that define it as a particular place.
This isn't about blind love for a country. It is about understanding the delicate balance between tolerating others and maintaining a coherent identity: there are different shades of British identity, but they are undeniably British.
We may express it differently, but we both grasp the same truth: the space to be yourself only exists when certain boundaries hold. She is one of a handful of politicians I see able to make this subtle case with a thoughtfulness lacking in our politics today. Her British identity is not something which she takes for granted – she could easily have followed another route – and this gives her a refreshing insight into this country.
Knowing all this about her, I was surprised when a journalist from The New Statesman called me a few weeks ago. He said he wanted to talk about Nigeria in the 1990s. In truth he was fishing for unflattering stories about Kemi. The published article bore no resemblance to the conversation we had: this is a small window into the misrepresentation she faces daily. The online caricatures, the lazy stereotypes masquerading as analysis, the attacks from Left and Right for refusing to be what others expect – she's navigated being misunderstood since that Lagos classroom.
Her job ahead may look impossible to some; fixing the Conservative Party's reputation after a tumultuous 14 years in government is no easy task.
But those who doubt Kemi, or sneer at her, should consider that her Methodist upbringing prepared her for politics – just as it prepared her 30 years ago to stand up to that school cheat. Standing alone is sometimes the price of standing for something.
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