On one side was the Nigerian government, desperate to preserve the multi-ethnic state built by Britain’s colonial administration. On the other were the Biafra separatists who sought the autonomy of the Igbo people of Nigeria, an ethnic minority originally from the south of the country that faced persecution and pogroms in the north. With control of Nigeria’s oil production at stake, the former colonial superpowers jockeyed for influence, most notably the United Kingdom. In 1967, Nigeria was still a member of the Commonwealth and Elizabeth had remained its head of state – the ‘Queen of Nigeria’ – until 1963. In order to maintain influence and control, the UK government, led by Harold Wilson, funneled massive amounts of arms and ammunition to the Nigerian government. The war was a humanitarian disaster for Nigeria’s 52 million people. A year after the conflict, more than a thousand children were starving to death every day. Television cameras beamed images of their agony – as well as evidence of further wartime atrocities – around the world. Wilson responded to the public backlash by misleading parliament about the UK’s involvement, even as it increased the flow of arms, declassified documents revealed in 2020. After the queen’s death, the Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, who fought alongside government, praised the royal family as “a very strong ally even in the midst of our difficult times during the Biafra war. they supported the indivisibility of the Nigerian state, they supported and ensured that we overcome this problem”. At the time, Uju’s mother Anya had two children under the age of 10 and was pregnant with a third. A native of Trinidad who had called Nigeria home for less than a decade has just missed a ride on the last foreign charter plane carrying refugees out of the war zone. As soldiers turned British-supplied weapons against civilians, razing entire villages and burning ancestral lands, Anya’s mother fled with her in-laws, taking whatever cover they could find. “We lost half our relatives,” says Anya, who was born six years later. “This is the legacy of this war. It was a genocide, a massacre, a holocaust.” That was the story that weighed on Anya, now an associate professor of applied linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, when she saw the news of the queen’s impending death on Thursday. “I heard that the arch-monarch of a thieving, hasty genocidal empire is finally dying. Let her pain be excruciating,” she wrote in a tweet to her nearly 70,000 followers. He then left to teach a graduate course on identity and language learning. Three hours later, Anya came back online to be greeted with a flood of condemnation, much of it racist and misogynistic. Photo: Twitter In the media firestorm that followed, Anya was transformed from a dissenting voice into a true enemy of the West. Her original tweet was removed by Twitter and she was locked out of her account. She began receiving a deluge of hate mail, prompting her to disable the “contact me” box on her personal website and start screening her calls. Piers Morgan, a fierce defender of the monarchy, called Anya “an evil, disgusting fool”. Many more called for him to be fired. Although she has not faced any formal discipline, Carnegie Mellon released a statement condemning her tweets as “offensive and unacceptable.” “I’m no stranger to controversy and trolling on Twitter,” Anya says. “But this was on a scale that surprised even me. I imagined there would be a backlash, but how far this thing went, I didn’t understand.” The royal family’s wealth has been estimated at $28 billion. Elizabeth never acknowledged or apologized for the atrocities of colonial rule. Anya’s entire life has been shaped by crown rule, starting with her mother’s homeland of Trinidad – a former plantation colony whose land and people were also plundered to enrich the royal family. Her parents, whom she calls “colonial nationals,” met in England as university students. But after the war they effectively separated and Anya’s mother immigrated to the United States in the 1980s. “The wider impact of the British monarchy, you can see in my story,” she says, “beyond the immediate, tangible impact of her rule Queen Elizabeth. So when I heard that the woman was dying, I was happy. Wouldn’t you like it if you heard that your oppressor was dying?’ Twitter is a tough place for a university professor. But for Anya, who tweets from her personal account, the platform is the rare linguistic and cultural innovation that recognizes black innovation. “I follow words like ‘whom,’” he says. “I’ve looked at the way people do, ‘I screamed, I screamed, I thought. Morphological changes and new vocabulary are constantly being introduced.’ Anya didn’t escape kicking the strange drones nest either. When controversial YouTube relationship expert Kevin Samuels died in May, she danced over his “despicable corpse.” This prompted his legion of supporters to dig up tweets in which he referred to native black Americans as akatas, a term widely considered derogatory. “In my memory, usage, and experience with the word, it’s a very neutral word that literally means ‘African American,’” Anya says. However, at the time, he apologized, noting: “Perception is reality and impact trumps intent. So even though I didn’t use the word with any intent to offend African Americans, that’s what I ended up doing.” He still doesn’t hesitate to use other colorful terms when hitting back at competitors. When a white mother made news for filing a lawsuit against her black biracial son’s high school for implementing a curriculum that allegedly included critical race theory, Anya tweeted that mothers like her couldn’t truly love black children . Many took exception to these remarks then as well. Anya is also quick to point out that black and brown people have been vilified for tweeting badly about the Queen, while white Irish people have shouted “Lizzy’s in a box” at a football match or released a video of Irish youngsters “doing Riverdance”. . as if celebrating her death, she says. “I see it for what it is: racism. Not only that, I’m a black woman who is very vocal on the left, very outspoken about anti-racism, critical race theory, and queer rights. Put it all together and I’m definitely the juiciest target for internet hate.” In the wake of Carnegie Mellon’s statement, Anya received letters of support from Carnegie Mellon faculty members and students. A third letter of support from colleagues at other institutions and the wider community, which has nearly 4,000 signatures, singled out Bezos in particular, calling his tweets a devastating “attack on a black Nigerian-Trinidadian-American professor, coming from a man who has amassed its wealth through global domination and exploitation without regard for the most vulnerable and precarious people on our planet. This, frankly, is no different from the colonial enterprise of the British monarchy – Bezos simply blended the colonial scheme through neoliberal racial capitalism, exploitation and greed.” Anya is also quick to note that the chair of Carnegie Mellon’s modern languages department has been steadfast in her personal and professional support – and even went the extra step of posting a security guard outside a recent department social gathering to ease Anya’s anxiety for the safety of her and her children. It’s been just over a year since Anya left a position at Penn State to join the faculty at Carnegie Mellon. Although her position is not guaranteed, she is not particularly worried about losing her job. The university was well aware of her penchant for speaking hard truths to power when they hired her as part of the post-2020 diversification effort. Pushback comes with the territory and Anya gets away with it all. “They recognize me as irreverent, flamboyant,” he says. “You don’t know how many times I’ve been called humble and arrogant. And we all know what that means: “young”. “The thing is, I shouldn’t be so sure of myself, given the humility of who I think I am. [my critics’] eyes. This was a ripe opportunity to take me down some…
