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African Descendant Claims British Threatened Her Ancestor, Then Learns He Was a Slaver Trying to Keep Brits from Ending Slavery in City He Ruled

Normally, we shouldn’t have to care about Ọmọba Antoinette Oyínkánsọ́lá Fernandez, better known as Antoinette Fernandez.

Her major claim to fame was that she was the Green Party candidate in the 2024 United Kingdom General Election for the parliamentary seat in Hackney North and Stoke Newington. She finished second, with 23 percent of the vote to 60 percent for the Labour Party candidate.

However, the Green Party — which has become a radical identitarian party that panders to the worst elements of Britain’s Islamic community — has seen a dramatic rise in its fortunes in the past few years, including winning a by-election in February that augurs poorly for Labour going forward. Fernandez, therefore, has a good chance of becoming a member of the U.K. Parliament in the not-too-distant future.

Second, Fernandez is profoundly ignorant and is willing to use that ignorance as a cudgel to make you think that she’s owed deference because of Britain’s colonial past. She is of Nigerian descent, and as she claims, her great-great-grandfather — a king — was overthrown by the Brits to avoid his people being massacred.

Just one problem, as users on social media pointed out: If her story is true, the British Navy overthrew her great-great-grandfather to stop the slave trade, which he was facilitating.

Talk about an unforced error.

So first the post, which was made a little under two years ago, but only got attention now. In it, Fernandez quote-posted a thread about the British annexation of Lagos, the former capital of Nigeria, in 1861.

“My great, great maternal grandfather was the Oba (king) of Lagos in 1861 and was forced — under threat of military bombardment — aka to avoid a massacre of the people — to cede Lagos over to the British,” she wrote.

“Lest we forget.”

Well, there are several errors in there, starting with the fact that the taking of Lagos happened in 1851 — but those keys are right next to each other.

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Not next to each other are the keys “forced — under threat of military bombardment — aka to avoid a massacre of the people” and “forced to cede Lagos because it was an epicenter of the African slave trade and the king (or ‘oba,’ if you prefer) was involved in it.”

Thank heavens for community notes, which began popping up earlier this week:

Fernandez deleted the August 2024 post on Friday morning U.K. time, and indeed hasn’t posted anything from her X account, period, since 2025. However, a bit of background from the website Royal Marines History, which describes the battle in which the king was deposed following a Dec. 26, 1851, battle.

The battle of December 26, 1851 was termed by Lagosians Ogun Ahoyaya/Ogun Agidingbi (translated, “The Boiling Battle”). Captain Jones led the attack party consisting HMS Bloodhound, HMS Teaser, a flotilla of boats including The Victoria and The Harlequin equipped with overwhelming fire power engaged Kosoko in a battle lasting three days.
  
Kosoko put up a stiff resistance, but the Royal Navy’s superior firepower won the day. [Oba] Kosoko and his leading chiefs fled Lagos for Epe on December 28, 1851. According to Samuel Davies, a Saro and younger brother of JPL Davies who participated on the British side aboard HMS Bloodhound, Kosoko would have inflicted great losses on the Royal Navy if he had deployed his war canoes with their swivel guns. …

The power of the Royal Navy was subsequently used to suppress the slave trade, and while some illegal trade, mostly with Brazil, continued, the Atlantic slave trade would be eradicated by the middle of the 19th century.

Well, that’s not a good look. It’s worth noting that the official annexation of Lagos by the British occurred in 1861, but the overthrow of her beloved oba, who was behind shipping slaves to the Americas and elsewhere, happened 10 years earlier.

Why should this make a difference, aside from the fact that it’s a grimly humorous self-own?

For those of you who don’t have time to pay attention to the politics of dear ol’ Blighty while keeping track of our own, the U.K.’s system is undergoing a seismic upheaval at the moment. Since the World War II coalition government, the leader of the ruling coalition has either been a member of the Labour or Conservative party, the latter colloquially known as the “tories.” They function much as the Democrats or Republicans do in the United States — and even though there are a greater number of third parties who manage to make it into Parliament, they usually function as small members of the larger coalitions ruled by the left- or right-wing parties.

However, a succession of failed Labour and Conservative governments has soured the Brits on their two major parties, particularly on immigration (for the right) and support for Israel (on the left). A March Ipsos poll found that if a general election were held today, conservative alternative party Reform U.K., led by Nigel Farage, would get 28 percent of the vote, first place. The Greens are tied for third with 17 percent, and only four points behind Labour, their main rival.

Moreover, the “green” in Green Party isn’t ecological anymore so much as it is Islamist. When Hannah Spencer won that aforementioned by-election in Gorton and Denton in February, with more than 50 percent of the vote, she did it by pandering to the Islamic community there — releasing campaign advertisements in Urdu, a language related to Hindi but mostly spoken by Muslims, the U.K. National noted.

This is the kind of racial- and ethnic-identity struggle sessions that the Green Party hopes will win it votes the next time a major general election comes around. And you know what? They’re probably right.

Thus, expect to hear quite a bit about the perfidies visited by the Brits on Ọmọba Antoinette Oyínkánsọ́lá Fernandez’s great-great-grandfather, without any mention of the perfidies he visited on his own people, more than a few times in the House of Commons. We’ll get told the Brits were the ones behind the slave trade, without any talk of them ending it. And the media will just shut up and pretend that Africa would be wonderful if only we’d have listened to people like the modern Greens.

C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014.

C. Douglas Golden is a writer who splits his time between the United States and Southeast Asia. Specializing in political commentary and world affairs, he’s written for Conservative Tribune and The Western Journal since 2014. Aside from politics, he enjoys spending time with his wife, literature (especially British comic novels and modern Japanese lit), indie rock, coffee, Formula One and football (of both American and world varieties).

Birthplace

Morristown, New Jersey

Education

Catholic University of America

Languages Spoken

English, Spanish

Topics of Expertise

American Politics, World Politics, Culture

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