The British Dorian Gray: The Duality of the United Kingdom’s Policies Toward Africa
By Amjad Farid Al-Tayeb
In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the protagonist strikes a Faustian bargain that grants him eternal youth and an immaculate public appearance, while his portrait—hidden away in an attic—absorbs the moral and psychological decay brought on by his sins. This literary metaphor offers a powerful analytical framework for examining the United Kingdom’s policies toward Africa. A close look reveals that Britain presents to the world a polished, liberal façade—one reflecting international legality, democracy, justice, and human rights—while concealing the true portrait of its actions: a set of policies that contradict these proclaimed values.
This contradiction is not a mere political fluctuation, but the product of a deeper strategic transformation that began as Britain sought to redefine its global role in the aftermath of Brexit. Step by step, the UK has shed many of its normative ethical obligations—many of which were enforced through EU treaties—in favor of pragmatic, interest-driven alliances reflecting a philosophical shift in what “British values” mean in an era of inward retrenchment. This retreat from values is also evident in the mounting political calls for Britain to withdraw from the European Court of Human Rights and in the campaign to amend the Human Rights Act of 1998, which is rooted in the European Convention on Human Rights, particularly with regard to protections for migrants and asylum seekers.
The UK presents itself internationally as a country grounded in the rule of law, humanitarian generosity, and the defense of rights. Yet this polished image does not reflect the hidden portrait stored in Africa’s attic—the disfigured face of Britain’s real policies on the continent. These distortions are clearest in two intertwined files: Sudan, which represents the sin of silence and complicity in the face of systematic atrocities; and Rwanda, which embodies the sin of political engineering and the manipulation of reality to reproduce patterns of dominance under the guise of partnership.
These cases are not anomalies. They reflect an entrenched pattern in Britain’s utilitarian approach to Africa—one that places British interests above ethical commitments, using the language of human rights and “equal partnership” as a deceptive instrument to justify practices that exacerbate regional instability, legitimize abuses, and undermine international efforts to combat corruption and human rights violations.
In the post-Brexit context, the UK seeks to recast its trade and security relations with Africa and the world on overtly transactional terms. The gap between Britain’s stated principles and the reality of its actions reveals a continuity of hegemonic logic dressed in new clothes, raising core questions about its role in supporting global stability and justice.
In the Sudan file, Britain’s role cannot be understood without acknowledging its historical roots. Sudan is not a peripheral foreign-policy concern, but a direct product of the British colonial enterprise, whose officials drew its borders and built its administrative structures. This history gives Britain’s contemporary involvement a dual moral dimension—further deepened by its participation in the Quartet mechanism before the current war, as well as by the efforts of its former ambassador to Khartoum, Giles Lever, to impose specific visions for military and security-sector reform. After the war erupted, Britain assumed the role of “penholder” for drafting UN and Security Council resolutions on Sudan—a position that carries clear political weight and amplifies its ethical responsibility.
Yet recent reports have exposed a troubling British complicity in suppressing the extent of the catastrophe unfolding in Sudan. According to a December 2025 Guardian report based on a government leak, the Foreign Office censored warnings about the risk of genocide being carried out by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Darfur. Officials were instructed to avoid the term “genocide” in early conflict assessments and to soften language to suggest that Darfur “might return to conflict.” This censorship continued even after the massacre in El Geneina—widely classified as genocide not only by human-rights organizations but by the US government itself.
The Guardian report revealed that the primary motivation for this censorship was the desire to avoid angering the United Arab Emirates, which has been supporting the RSF with weapons, financing, and political backing. Here, British pragmatism takes its most brutal form: the very country that claims to lead on Sudan at the Security Council chose to disable early-warning mechanisms for genocide to protect its alliances and economic interests. This was not a bureaucratic error but a deliberate policy that institutionalized internal censorship to shield partners implicated in atrocities—reinforcing impunity and making Britain an indirect participant in prolonging the conflict.
This was not the first instance of British complicity in the war. Reports from The Guardian and other outlets in June 2024 indicated that the Foreign Office sought to suppress criticism of foreign and regional actors arming the RSF. Other reports indicated that British-made military equipment ended up in RSF hands, raising serious questions about the effectiveness of export controls and whether the UK knowingly turned a blind eye as its weapons reached a fascist militia perpetrating crimes akin to genocide.
Such conduct establishes a pattern that goes beyond diplomatic failure, pointing instead to active complicity in concealing crimes. It undermines Britain’s credibility as a responsible global actor and raises questions about whether its rights-based rhetoric is merely a veneer for protecting economic interests at the expense of human lives.
The British approach toward Sudan mirrors a pattern also visible in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where London downplayed evidence of Rwanda’s support for the M23 rebellion to preserve its asylum-deportation deal with Kigali. This connection is no coincidence: it reflects a consistent logic—from silence about crimes in Sudan to shielding a perpetrator in Rwanda—turning human-rights concerns into bargaining chips rather than principled commitments.
If Sudan represents failure through silent complicity, Rwanda represents failure through deliberate action. The UK’s policy of deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda was not merely an immigration measure but a philosophical rupture with international law, commodifying human rights in exchange for political gains. The policy’s trajectory was turbulent: when the UK Supreme Court ruled in November 2023 that Rwanda was unsafe and that the policy violated the principle of non-refoulement, the government did not reconsider its human-rights standards. Instead, it enacted the 2024 “Safety of Rwanda Act,” forcing courts to treat Rwanda as safe by statute, irrespective of the facts—an unprecedented blow to judicial independence.
In 2025, following a change of government and the Conservatives’ electoral defeat, the deportation plan was repealed under the new Border Security and Asylum Act of 2025, which canceled key elements of the previous policy and committed to processing asylum claims within the UK. Britain also refused to pay additional funds to Rwanda.
These developments exposed the UK’s view of asylum: a transformation from a humanitarian obligation under the 1951 Convention into an outsourced logistical burden. The arrangement with Rwanda became a commercial transaction—London paid hundreds of millions of pounds, while Kigali assumed responsibility for managing a human population. Refugees became transferable commodities, revealing the moral emptiness of Western human-rights discourse. Meanwhile, Britain ignored reports that Rwanda was simultaneously producing more refugees by supporting the M23 rebellion. UN reports documented thousands of Rwandan troops participating in the insurgency and implicated Rwanda in war crimes in the region. This vicious cycle highlighted a core contradiction: Britain was financing a government that contributed to the very crises it claimed to solve, deepening regional instability and increasing refugee flows.
When we assemble the elements of the British Dorian Gray portrait through its conduct in Sudan and Rwanda, the picture becomes clear: the UK has replaced value-driven diplomacy with interest-driven diplomacy. It ignores atrocities to maintain alliances with influential regional actors, deletes genocide from its vocabulary in Sudan to shield wealthy partners, and enacts coercive laws to externalize its domestic challenges onto Rwanda.
British diplomacy is not merely tarnished—it is decaying. This decay demands a profound reassessment of foreign policy to realign it with ethical principles before the damage becomes irreversible and Britain’s global credibility is lost entirely.
