Nigeria-born American professor, Uju Anya, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University has explained why she wished the late Queen Elizabeth II of England “excruciating pain.”
Gatekeepers News reports that Anya stated during an interview with a foreign news outlet, The CUT, that the late Queen Elizabeth II’s throne “represents the legacy of enslavement and colonialism and its direct harm.”
The modern languages department’s professor said that “the harm shaped my entire life and continues to be my story and that of the people she harmed.”
Anya said, “On Thursday, I was just reading the BBC, which had been making announcements that there were worries for the queen’s health and death was imminent. It brought on a whole lot of emotions and pain — primarily pain — about who this monarch was and what she represented, not just in the broad sense of what her throne represents, the legacy of enslavement and colonialism, but also the direct harm.
People say, “Oh, she’s just a figurehead, she didn’t really do anything, as if she’s somehow withdrawn from this. They tell me, You’re talking about colonialism. Was that even in your lifetime?”
“My experience of who she was, and the British government she supervised, is a very painful one. The harm shaped my entire life and continues to be my story and that of the people she harmed — that her government harmed, that her kingdom harmed, however, you want to frame it.
The genocide of Biafra killed 3 million Igbo people, and the British government wasn’t just in political support of the people who perpetrated this massacre; they directly funded it. They gave it political cover and legitimacy”.
She told The CUT, “This wasn’t just something I just read about. I was born to colonial subjects on both sides of the family — one parent from Trinidad, where the British enslaved people, and one parent from Nigeria. They met in England at university and moved back to Nigeria after independence in 1960. My parents were survivors of this genocide. My three siblings, two of them under the age of 10 at the time, were survivors.
“My mother was pregnant with my brother, who was born during that time; he was a war baby. This was the legacy I was born into in 1976. I spent the first ten years of my life living in Nigeria, and there was always this specter of who was lost. My earliest memories were from living in a war-torn area, and rebuilding still hasn’t finished even today. Half of my family was slaughtered with guns and bombs that this queen sent to kill us”.
She added, “Queen Elizabeth was a representative of the cult of white womanhood. There’s this notion that she was this little-old-lady grandma type with her little hats and her purses and little dogs and everything — as if she inhabited this place or this space in the imaginary, this public image, as someone who didn’t have a hand in the bloodshed of her Crown. How did she have that Crown? Even the crowns she wears are looted and plundered from the lands they exploited and extracted from. The entire treasury is a legacy of thievery that was achieved by murder, by enslavement, and it didn’t stop after independence”.
When asked what it was like being quote-tweeted by Jeff Bezos, she said, “Jeff Bezos incited violence against me. He rarely tweets in his voice, but he took the time to single me out when literally half the planet rejoiced over the news. I can’t ignore the racism and misogyny — the emails I’ve been getting all started with the N-word, bitch, genetically inferior, all kinds of things. I don’t open them, but I see the subject lines. There’s also a reason I caught his attention. I recently met Chris Smalls, the young Black man who unionized at Amazon, at an event. I took a picture with him and tweeted it, praising him and saying, “Extraordinary brilliant and powerful young man who unionized Amazon.” We all know Bezos is a small and petty man”.
