it no news by now that you must have heard of the controversial tweet making news around the world. Uju Anya an associate professor of applied linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, the professor sparked outrage when she wished the queen a painful death. She tells the Guardian about the UK’s role in the ‘slaughter’ of 1967 BiaFra civil war in Nigeria,
In 1967 Nigeria was still a member of the Commonwealth and Elizabeth had remained its head of state – the “Queen of Nigeria” – until 1963. Intent on maintaining influence and control, the UK government, led by Harold Wilson, funneled vast amounts of arms and munitions toward the Nigerian government.
The war was a humanitarian catastrophe for Nigeria’s 52 million people. A year into the conflict, more than a thousand children were starving to death each day. TV cameras beamed images of their anguish – as well as evidence of further wartime atrocities – all over the world. Wilson responded to the public backlash by misleading parliament about the UK’s involvement, even as he increased the flow of arms, declassified documents revealed in 2020. In the wake of the queen’s death, the Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, who fought on the side of the government, praised the royal family as “a very strong ally even in the midst of our difficult time during the Biafran war; they stood for the indivisibility of the Nigerian state, supported and ensured that we overcame that problem”.
“We lost half of our relatives,” says Anya, who was born six years later. “That’s the legacy of this war. It was a genocide, a slaughter, a holocaust.”
