Examining Uju Anya’s Vitriol On Queen Elizabeth

FESTUS ADEDAYO’S FLICKERS

Like a prude confronted with sexually explicit images, the world didn’t hide its shock at Nigerian-born American professor, Uju Anya’s negative comments last week on late British monarch, Queen Elizabeth II. The world had waited with bated breath at manifest indications that Elizabeth’s last hours had come. Amid this apprehension, the Associate Professor of Applied Linguistics, Critical Sociolinguistics and Critical Discourse at Carnegie Mellon University launched her salvo. It came in the form of a tweet that brimmed with bile and hate. She had twitted: “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving,  raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.” It was a bazooka that upset and shook the world out of its sanctimony.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos, world’s third richest man, had an immediate riposte for Anya. “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don’t think so. Wow,” he had written. Not one to be cowed, Anya launched another diatribe at both Bezos and the now-confirmed-dead 96-year old monarch. “If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star,” she tweeted. Uju was apparently making reference to the 1967–1970 Nigerian-Biafran war during which time the British Empire, supporting Nigeria, supplied arms and ammunition that helped Nigeria vanquish Biafra. About 1 million people reportedly died in the needless war. For Bezos, Anya had a harangue: “May everyone you and your merciless greed have harmed in this world remember you as fondly as I remember my colonizers.”

Uju is apparently an against-method academic. Born of a Nigerian/Trinidadian origin, her parents lived in Enugu, Nigeria and her father’s embrace of the African polygyny fractured the wedlock, necessitating her Trinidadian mother fleeing to America with her and siblings. A self-confessed lesbian, Uju got legally separated from her husband in 2017, even as she publicly announced her against-the-grain sexuality.

While Uju may be considered to have stepped off the borders of humanity by wishing another creation “excruciating death,” the facts of her grouse are in the public domain and needed not be glossed over. An analysis of Anya’s tweet reveals three key elements in her accusations against the British Empire, viz theft, rape and genocide-support. There is none of these allegations which historical renditions, especially by African and Africanist scholars, have not leveled against British colonizers.

Apparently because of her vested interest in Nigeria, Britain overtly supported Nigeria in the civil war and indeed supplied arms and ammunition to Nigeria. Thousands of Igbo had been killed in the 1966 pogrom with Britain, the immediate past suzerain, lifting no finger. The Harold Wilson government, through its lackey High Commissioner in Lagos, David Hunt, was unapologetically against Biafra. As the war raged, 1.8 million refugees sprang up in Biafra, many of whom were living skeletons, kwashiorkor-stricken kids. Karl Jaggi, head of the Red Cross at the time, had estimated that about a million children were killed by hunger and bullets but Red Cross saved about half a million through its intervention.

With the help of BBC correspondent, Fredrick Forsyth, the terrifying pictures of skeleton-like children appeared on British TV and unsettled Britons, leading to lack of appetite as those figures disrupted the flow of their dinner meals. The hitherto covered grim situations of the war, which Wilson had shielded from the British people’s view, sparked outrage and revealed Britain’s complicity in the genocidal war against the people of Nigeria. Queen Elizabeth was so powerful that if she indeed desired that the war should not be fought by both youthful soldiers, Yakubu Gowon and EmekaOdumegwu-Ojukwu, no blood would be shed by both parties.

Before Anya, Forsyth had revealed this complicity and connivance by Britain’s top echelon of power. The truth is that, if Britain and her monarchy had insisted that the Aburi Accord, struck by the two leaders in Ghana, be observed to the letter, there would not have been the bloodshed that eventually occurred.

Stung by British complicity in the multiple deaths, it was either Britain did not seek armistice between the warring countries or it failed. Did Harold Wilson and David Hunt act contrary to Queen Elizabeth’s desire for the people that used to be known as Biafra? If the debonair Queen didn’t stop Wilson from supporting war on Biafra, why does anybody want to spare her of history’s unkind jab for the colossal deaths during the Biafran war?

Facts of history do not see Britain and ipso facto, Queen Elizabeth, as benevolent but cruel conquistadors. Till today, Britain’s foundational roles in the socio-political woes Nigeria currently faces have not ceased from jutting out of remembrancers’ lips. In Kenya, Britain’s conquistador role was no less benumbing. Between 1952 – the year Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne – and 1960, a revolt of the Kikuyu tribe against British rule reigned. The war was fought over three issues – the expulsion of Kikuyu tenants from settler farms, white settlers taking over lands and Britain’s failure to ascribe political representation to Kenyans in their own land. In the uprising, 32 white settlers and about 200 British police, as well as soldiers were said to have been killed. More than 1,800 African civilians were also killed. The number of Mau Mau rebels killed was put at around 20,000. Many of the empires under British suzerainty will also remember Britain with grim lacing their hearts.

Thus, while we stricture Prof Anya, we should not gloss over history. By our human convention and norm, Anya tripped over the borders. The convention is for us to beatify fellow residents of this human space who transit mortality for immortality and their earthly sins forgiven them. Our laws are no less guilty as even criminals undergoing trial have their cases discontinued. But should we allow the dead to escape that easily?

Britain dealt unkindly with her empires like merchandise and forcefully and unjustly expropriated their natural endowments like mercantile do. In the process, many lives were lost and futures railroaded. While many of those Mephistophelean activities of Britain took place before Queen Elizabeth ascended the throne, as the monarch that the rest of the world has known in the last 70 years, she should be a recipient of the assets and cruelty of her ancestors. Methinks this was what Anya tried to say but which, either due to her unbridled anger and lack of diplomatese, she failed to pad with niceties – as the world wanted. Attempts at suppressing the angst against the past, rather than placate offspring of those whose kindred’s blood was spilled by rulers, in connivance with colonial authorities, have boomeranged. Treating them dismissively and dressing them in derogatory words like “dot in a circle” have led to the metastasis of the hate and curated characters like Anya and NnamdiKanu.

The culture of not speaking ill of the dead has been ancient and perhaps part of the rest of humanity. Africa has carried this culture on its head, perhaps even more pretentiously than the rest of the world. History has however not allowed us to close our eyes to the evils perpetrated around us, even by ancient African monarchies who are the precursors of the current kings. From Sunni Ali Ber, first King of the Songhai Empire and 15th ruler of the Sunni dynasty who conducted a repressive policy against the scholars of Timbuktu; Askia the Great, emperor of the Songhai empire; Shaka the Zulu; IdrisAlooma; BenhazinBowelle of Dahomey; Menelik II; Mansa Musa of Mali and down to some of our ancient Alaafins of the old Oyo Empire as well as their chiefs like the wicked BashorunGaa, Africa too does not have a sparse supply of despots. Today, we paper over these excesses in history, just as we are doing with the Kings and Queen of England.

British monarchy and some monarchies in the world are realizing that modernity may make it hard for them to continually assert the fiery powers of their fiefdoms as they did in time past. This, I think, is the most enduring manifestations of the monarchy superintended over by Elizabeth II. While the monarchical power is huge and awesome, it is dressed in ceremonial robe, while the political power, on the outward, looks like the decider of the destinies of Britain and its erstwhile colonies.  It however does not remove from the fact that those monarchies were umpires of blood and tears in colonial territories some centuries ago.

The realization of this wave was advocated by the author of celebrated Yoruba classic, Igbi Aye Nyi – Life swivels like a wind – Chief T. A. A. Ladele. Written in 1978. Ladele, an Okeho, Oyo State-born History teacher at Durbar College, Oyo and pioneer Headmaster of Baptist School, Iwere-Ile, was one of Nigeria’s early writers. In, Igbi Aye Nyi, the 1920-born writer sought to teach us all about the ephemeral worth of political power and the un-enduring texture of raw brawn. Set in a town called Otolu at the outset of colonial incursion into Nigeria, Oba Bankarere, the Otolu king, in concert with his sons, inflicted huge terror on his subjects in his excessive wielding of power. He flaunted the wealth that accrued from power and defied all known societal norms. Two of Oba Bankarere’s subjects however rose to save the sanity of the traditional institution and the lives of the people. In the end, the colonial government waded in to curtail these excesses in a manner that rubbished the king and curtailed his outlaw sons.

That culture of defending the dead, even when we know their excesses while alive, is what the rest of the world seems to be espousing with Queen Elizabeth’s transition. While I agree that wishing evil on the living as Professor Anya did was not tidy enough and sounds very inhuman, I am not against her dwelling on the perceived soft landing for genocide that Britain under the Queen’s watch gave the Nigerian war. By not treading this path of beatifying the dead, in spite of themselves, Professor Anya and travelers on her kind of boat have received flaks on their persons. Some even went to the extent of deploying Anya’s sexuality to attack her. Yes, Africans cannot stand same-sex relationships, but the fact of our global existence is that the biology of some people is misdirected towards such sexuality, in spite of themselves. There are so many citizens of the globe who share our admirable opposite-sex biology but whose minds are as odious and repugnant as the sewer. So why beatify the latter and incinerate the former?

To my mind, the culture of beatifying the dead with a blanket of “a life well lived” is self-serving. Most of the time, we spread this omnibus blanket as shawl on the disreputable lives lived by the dead simply because we all dread what the world would say when we too exit the world. This was aptly explained by the late Ilorin, Kwara State Dadakwada maestro, OdolayeAremu, who sang that no one can predict who will be free of being drenched by a rain that is yet to abate. He had expressed it in his lyrics as Ojotinroti o da, Olohun lo moiyeeniti o pa.

The way to go is, let whoever live their lives miserably be apportioned strictures commensurate with their measly lives and those who live life as puritans be so accorded at their departure. We have taken this apportioning of blanket beatification on the dead to such an absurd level that it encourages evil doers to bask in the warmth of their evil broths. This does not discourage the living from evil. While it is nice to beatify Queen Elizabeth as it is being done all over the world for her recorded great footprints while alive, let non-conformists like Anya freely dwell on the misgivings they have about her too. They should not be made victims of unfavourable censor or censure.