Uju Anya: Beyond the bile

THE Empire wrote back this week as the world mourned the passing of Queen Elizabeth II. Uju Anya, a Nigerian-American linguist, sparked off a global fire-storm when she tweeted, typically avoiding commas: “The chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dead. May her pain be excruciating.” Millions around the world were aghast. Her employers, Carnegie Mellon University, quickly issued a rebuttal, saying: “The views she shared absolutely do not represent the values of the institution, nor the standards of discourse we seek to foster.” But Anya stuck to her guns, saying that “Queen Elizabeth was representative of the cult of white womanhood” and that even “the crowns she wore were looted and plundered from the lands they exploited and extracted from.” She then added for good measure: “The entire treasury is a legacy of thievery that was achieved by murder, by enslavement, and it didn’t stop after independence.”

And she was not alone in deriding the British monarchy. In Oxford, a man shouted: “Who elected him?” at the new King. And in Edinburgh, there were people calling him “a sick old man” and demanding the abolition of the monarchy, perhaps because the royals cost taxpayers $100 million per year, and King Charles will inherit the Queen’s $500 million fortune without paying inheritance tax. The King used to be friends with Jeffrey Epstein, the late American business mogul who allegedly provided pubescent girls as sex toys to wealthy friends, including His Majesty, who had to make a donation to an alleged victim’s charity. In South Africa (with the non-conformist Julius Malema) and other parts of the Commonwealth, ex-victims of British brutality railed at Her Majesty’s memory. And, what is more, critics home and abroad had an ally in mediums such as Aljazeera, which reported Her Majesty’s proceedings with the same sneering, dismissive tone that CNN, BBBC, New York Times and co normally greet the passing of African leaders, except of course benevolent ones like Nelson Mandela.

Anya, panned by thousands of enraged Westerners, was irreverent but the charges thrown at Britain, which at the height of its power ruled a fifth of the world’s population and a quarter of its total land area, are legitimate. During the Second Boer War (1899-1902), British soldiers rounded up a sixth of the Boer population in camps, causing the deaths of 27,927 souls out of the estimated 107,000 people interned in the camps. On April 13, 1919, hundreds of demonstrators against British colonial rule in Amritsar, India, were cut down in the most brutal fashion, as were thousands of Kenyans who were raped and tortured during the Mau Mau Uprising (1951-1960). Between 1952 and 1960, the British hanged over 1,090 suspected Mau Mau rebels. Electric shock, cigarettes, fire, broken bottles, gun barrels, knives, snakes, vermin, and hot eggs were thrust up men and women’s privates. Ngugi Wa Thiong’O’s Weep not, child comes in handy here. In 1943, up to four million Bengalis starved to death as Winston Churchill sent food to British soldiers and countries such as Greece while a deadly famine brought Bengal to its knees. Said Sir Churchill: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion. The famine was their own fault for breeding like rabbits.” The list of atrocities is long, and Kenyan victims of bodily torture only got a favourable judgment in a British court in 2011: the court granted them right to pursue compensation. Some Kenyan tribes even sued the Crown last month. The British were widely implicated in the genocide that attended the Nigerian Civil War.

Anya’s post, perhaps inevitably, was widely seen through the lenses of colour in the United States and elsewhere. Her post, said the critics, was clearly anti-White, and so people in the United States who would ordinarily set no store by the monarchy saw Anya’s bile as being directed at whitedom. Ethnicity is no light matter: when the Soviet Union collapsed, it was into ethnic rather than political/ideological cocoons. But the fire-breathing, extensively travelled citizen of the world who has “slept with enough women to know that a natural, normal, achievable condition for women is easily 10-15 orgasms per sexual session”, who cannot seem to get over her troubled childhood, and who has in pursuit of “freedom” had to dump Catholicism, which she charged with being anti-woman and patriarchal, for African traditional religion, couldn’t be bothered. A woman who described her father as a “philanderer, an absolute whoremonger” who abandoned her mum for a mistress when she was only 10, and had to experience marriage to the man by whom she had two children to discover that she was not bisexual but a lesbian, is not one to be bothered by such niceties as civil discourse.

Yet the question of basic civility cannot be avoided. Anya fired shots of war at a time of peace. Wishing anyone “excruciating death” is venomous, an anathema in polite company. The wish is made even more absurd when it is realised that all human beings die whether good or bad, and that the death of an oppressor is often of no moment: Adolf Hitler is dead but his murderous ideology is not. A much more profitable line of discourse is the present ways Britain carries on the project of hegemony, not what it did (not) in the past. Besides, from a cultural perspective at least, holding Anya aloft as a defender of Black rights may be rather incautious: she is like the Black Lives Matter activists who claim to be against indiscriminate killing of black people by the racist white police but then stage violent displays when the Supreme Court gives a pro-life judgment. If black lives truly matter, why not black pregnancies? Africa is not helped by Anya’s lesbianism and, in any case, of all African countries, her native Nigeria, in an opinion poll, had the highest level of opposition to LGBTQIA advocacy, and for good reason.

Anya’s posts are not just those of a social critic and irreverent writer; they give the impression of oddity even if the author is extensively credentialled as a professor (lecturer) in a US university. Take this one on Igbo men, for example: “Well, if anyone knows anything about sucking the life out of somebody, it is an Igbo man.” This generalisation is puerile at least. Exactly how do Igbo men as a group suck life out of their women? When the admittedly controversial Pastor T.B Joshua of the Synagogue Church of Nations passed on, here’s what Anya wrote: “Celebrating the well deserved death of lying thieving charlatan TB Joshua, who cheated millions out of people in their most desperate days with fake prophecies and cruel promises from which he couldn’t save his sorry self.” She then added: “I don’t owe the family or people who loved TB Joshua my respect or silence about all the harm he caused. Just because they’re mourning a monster doesn’t mean I should.” The impression is given here that T. B Joshua would have been able to save himself from death if he weren’t fake.

The African past, at least as we learn from history, was not all about glory; it had (wo)men guilty of the same charges levelled at the departed Queen. On September 15, 2009, the late Chief Gani Fawehinmi’s elder brother, Justice Rasheed Fawehinmi (rtd), told the Nigerian Tribune of Lisa Alujannu of Ondo Kingdom, who died in 1908: “During his lifetime, he was so powerful that he even usurped the power of the Osemawe. Lisa Alujannu, noted for doing extraordinary things, once buried a pregnant woman alive at the height of his power.” Literary works such as Wole Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests show the futility of uncritical veneration of the African past. The converse, which is Achebe’s project in Things Fall Apart, is equally true: pre-colonial Africa was not one era of darkness from which colonialism rescued Africa. Like all histories, the story of Africa is a mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly, and there’s the key issue avoided by Anya but salient nonetheless: how do we want to approach the future? And that question then throws up another: Can we move forward by constantly looking back?

Beyond the question of colonialism and genocide, there are questions of underdevelopment touched on by Walter Rodney in his epochal How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. And thrown into the mix is the United States’ ongoing role in political interference around the world. What have African leaders been doing to rescue Africa from neocolonialism? Which African country can be held up as a model of democracy and good governance?

Besides, for some time now, there has been renewed interest in the African economy by the world powers, fuelling fears that the scramble for Africa, which took place between 1881 and 1914 and through which European nations divided and colonised the continent, may be here again on an economic plane. During the Prime Ministership of Theresa May, a British tabloid, The Spectator, accused the EU of protectionist policies that did so much to worsen poverty in Africa by placing tariffs on basic farm produce and keeping much African-produced food out of Europe through quotas and punitive tariffs. It said that climate change-related aid projects were often designed to keep Africans in a state of noble poverty, leading lives of environmental purity in order to allow European countries to carry on polluting for a little longer. It cited the UK aid project, Green Africa Power, which spent £9.4 million trying to bring solar and hydro power to nine million Africans, yet failed to provide a single gigawatt of electricity in five years of operation. Those are the kinds of conversation that matter today, not vitriol over the past.

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