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Seven years after Nigeria won independence from Britain – and 15 years into the reign of Queen Elizabeth II – civil war broke out in the former British colony.
On one side was the Nigerian government, desperate to preserve the multi-ethnic state that had been cobbled together by Britain’s colonial administration. On the other hand, the Biafra separatists sought autonomy for Nigeria’s Igbo people, an ethnic minority originally from the country’s south who faced persecution and pogroms in the north. With control of Nigeria’s oil production at stake, former colonial superpowers jostled for influence, not least Britain.
In 1967, Nigeria was still a member of the Commonwealth, and Elizabeth had remained its head of state – “The Queen of Nigeria” – until 1963. The British government, led by Harold Wilson, intended to retain influence and control. arms and ammunition against the Nigerian government.
The war was a humanitarian disaster for Nigeria’s 52 million people. A year into the conflict, more than a thousand children starved 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 Britain’s involvement even as he increased the flow of weapons, declassified documents revealed in 2020. In the wake of the queen’s death, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari fought on the side of the government, praising the royal family as “a very strong ally even in the middle of our difficult time during the Biafra war; they stood for the indivisibility of the Nigerian state, supported and ensured that we overcome that problem”.
At the time, Uju Anya’s mother had two children under 10 and was pregnant with a third. A native Trinidadian who had called Nigeria home for less than a decade, she just missed getting a ride on the last foreign charter plane airlifting refugees out of the war zone. As soldiers turned British-supplied weapons against civilians, razing entire villages and burning ancestral land, Anya’s mother fled with her in-laws, taking any cover they could find.
“We lost half of our relatives,” says Anya, who was born six years later. “That is the legacy of this war. It was a genocide, a slaughter, a holocaust.”
It was the story that weighed on Anya, now an associate professor of applied linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University, when she saw news of the queen’s impending death on Thursday. “I heard that the supreme monarch of a twentieth-rape genocidal kingdom is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,” she wrote in a tweet to her approximately 70,000 followers. Then she went away to teach a graduate seminar on identity and language learning.
Three hours later, Anya logged back online to be met with a flood of condemnation, much of it laced with racism and misogyny.
In the beginning, it was nothing she couldn’t handle. But then Jeff Bezos entered the chat. “This is someone who is supposedly working to make the world a better place?” wrote the world’s richest man. “I don’t think so. Wow.” Not only did Anya double down on her original wish, she offered another one to the Amazon founder in Igbo. It roughly translates to: “May everyone you and your merciless greed have harmed in this world remember you as fondly as I remember my colonizers.”
In the ensuing media storm, Anya went from a dissenting voice to a veritable 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 hateful messages, prompting her to disable the “contact me” box on her personal webpage and begin screening her calls. Piers Morgan, a fierce defender of the monarchy, called Anya a “disgusting, disgusting idiot”. Several have demanded that she be fired.
Although she has not faced any formal discipline, Carnegie Mellon has issued one announcement condemning her tweets as “offensive and offensive”. “I’m no stranger to Twitter controversy and drag,” Anya says. “But this one was on a scale that surprised even me. I imagined there would be a backlash, but how far this thing has gone, I didn’t know.”
The royal family’s wealth has been estimated at $28 billion. Elizabeth has never acknowledged or apologized for the atrocities of colonialism. Anya’s entire life has been shaped by the Crown, starting with her mother’s native Trinidad – a former plantation colony whose land and people were also plundered to enrich the royal family. Her parents, whom she calls “colonial subjects”, met in England as university students. But after the war they actually split up and Anya’s mother emigrated to the US in the 1980s. “The wider impact of the British monarchy, you can see that in my story,” she says, “in addition to the direct, felt-in-the-skin impact of Queen Elizabeth’s rule. So when I heard that the woman was dying, I rejoiced. Would you not, if you heard that your oppressor was dying?”
Twitter is a difficult place for a college professor to vent. But for Anya, who tweets from her personal account, the platform is the rare pile of linguistic and cultural innovation that acknowledges black innovation. “I follow words like ‘who,’” she says. “I’ve been looking at how people do, ‘I screamed, I screamed, I screamed’. Morphological changes and new vocabulary are introduced all the time.”
Anya hasn’t shied away from kicking the odd hornet’s nest either. When controversial YouTube relationship expert Kevin Samuels died in May, she danced on his “disgusting corpse”. That prompted his legion of followers to dig up tweets in which she referred to native black Americans as akatsa, a term widely considered derogatory. “In my recollection and usage and experience with the word, it’s a very neutral word that literally means ‘African American,’” Anya says. Yet at the time, she apologized, noting, “Perception is reality, and affect trumps intent. So while I didn’t use the word with any intent whatsoever to single out African-Americans, that’s what I ended up doing.” She still doesn’t hesitate to use other colorful expressions when hitting back at antagonists. When a white mother made news for suing her black biracial son’s middle 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 even then.
Still, Anya is surprised that her rebuke of the Queen caught the attention of Bezos – a man who has only sent 372 tweets since she joined the platform in 2008. She suspects it may have something to do with a photo she posted in August of her with Chris Smalls, the worker who successfully unionized an Amazon warehouse. “I 100% believe this is where it hit Jeff Bezos’ personal radar,” she says. “I’m sure they scrape and monitor mentions of Chris Small’s name. And added to the fact that I’m faculty at a university that they financially support.” By that, she means the three-year, $2 million pledge Amazon made in 2020 to Carnegie Mellon’s Computer Science Academy — which, among other things, provides a free online computer science curriculum to middle and high school students. (A Bezos spokesman declined to comment for the record .)
Anya is also quick to point out that black and brown people have been vilified for tweeting badly about the Queen, while white Irish shouted “Lizzy’s in a box” at a football match or circulated a video of Irish youth “doing Riverdance” as in celebration of 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, who is very outspoken about anti-racism, critical race theory, and queer rights. Put it all together, and I’m absolutely the juiciest target for collecting internet hate.”
In the wake of Carnegie Mellon’s arm’s-length statement, Anya has 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, takes particular exception to Bezos, calling his tweets a devastating “attack on a black Nigerian-Trinidadian-American professor coming from a man , who has amassed his wealth through global domination and exploitation without regard for the most vulnerable and precarious people on our planet. This is frankly not unlike the British Monarchy’s colonial project – Bezos simply remixed 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—even taking the extra step of posting a security guard outside a recent department social gathering to ease Anya’s security concerns of her and her children.
It’s been barely a year since Anya left a position at Penn State to join the Carnegie Mellon faculty. Although her position is not permanent, she is not particularly worried about losing her job. The university was well aware of her tendency to speak harsh truths to power when they hired her as part of post-2020 efforts to diversify.
Pushback comes with the territory, and Anya remains unfazed through it all. “I’m recognized for being a loudmouth who is disrespectful,” she says. “You don’t know how many times I’ve been called haughty and arrogant. And we all know what that means: ‘nigger’.”
“The assumption is that I shouldn’t be so sure of myself, given the humbleness of who I am perceived to be in [my critics’] eyes. This was a ripe opportunity to take me down a few pegs.”
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