EMMANUEL ONWUBIKO: THE DEATH OF QUEEN ELIZABETH: FLASHES OF BIAFRAN-NIGERIAN WAR
The Buckingham Palace England announced the departure of the British Monarch in the late afternoon of Thursday, September 8, 2022, as follows: "This afternoon, the Queen died peacefully at Balmoral. The king and Queen consort will spend the evening at Balmoral before returning to London tomorrow."
The announcement of the death of the World's most powerful and wealthy Monarch of Great Britain was simple and humble. She ruled the United Kingdom for 70 years and was the head of the Commonwealth of Nations for the same period.
However, before she died, British Prime Minister Ms.Liz Truss told the world about the Queen's worrying health situation: "The news from Buckingham Palace this lunchtime will frighten the entire country. At this time, my thoughts and those of the people of the United Kingdom are with Her Majesty the Queen and her family."
Similar emotional sentiments were heard from the White House and the offices of world leaders, with prayers being offered for "God to save the Queen."
These positive and prayerful wishes for the Queen, however, did not sit well with a certain Nigerian-born but US-based University professor, Professor Uju Anya, who dramatically wished the Queen a painful death.
She stated on her Twitter page: "I heard that the chief Monarch of a thieving, raping, genocidal empire has died. May her suffering be excruciating."
The tweet was later removed for violating "Twitter rules."
Furthermore, in another tweet, she alluded to the British empire's rumored role in supplying the Nigerian government with arms and ammunition during the country's civil war, which lasted from 1967 to 1970.
"If anyone expects me to express anything other than disgust for the monarch who oversaw a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome," she wrote after the Queen's death was announced.
Professor Uju Anya's tweets, understandably, drew the attention of many, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who quoted the post and wrote, "Isn't this someone who claims to be working to make the world a better place? No, I don't believe so. Wow."
Bashir Ahmed, President Buhari's Aide, also tweeted, "Didn't know Uju Anya until I saw some of her tweets for the first time on my timeline this evening, her tweets about late Queen Elizabeth II were so unfortunately unnecessary." I wrote shockingly because President Muhammadu Buhari's administration is highly divisive, sectarian, and nepotistic, and so many of his administrative styles are reminiscent of what led to that despicable war that Professor Uju Anya criticized in her tweets.
Another Twitter user, @novieverest, stated, "You can be anti-slavery and anti-colonialism without being a Uju Anya. Her statement was heinous, and you cannot justify it. It really is that simple."
Many others, however, defended the Professor for speaking out against the British Empire's colonial legacy under the late Queen.
@vickkingsley wrote, "Anya's tweets are a reflection of many people's unspoken sentiments." "The thing about Uju Anya's tweet is that many people feel the same way she does, but she was bold enough to say that even those who feel the same way as she do are all dragging her down. Uju Anya is the villain now, but you've always despised the British government and colonialism."
"I stand with Uju Anya. The level of sympathy for Queen Elizabeth's peaceful death has passed, leveling the sympathy for Africans who died as a result of colonialism because there was no social media," @Philosophierol tweeted.
Carnegie Mellon University, the American university where Anya teaches, also issued a statement distancing itself from the professor's remarks.
"We condemn the offensive and objectionable message posted today on Uju Anya's personal social media account."
"Free expression is central to the mission of higher education," the statement read. "However, the views expressed absolutely do not represent the values of the institution, nor the standard of discourse we seek to foster."
Further discussion would necessitate that this writer state unequivocally that Professor Uju Anya's comments were inappropriate, untimely, and poorly presented. There is also the immediate question of whether the Queen, as the Monarch, could have influenced the policies enacted by the Prime Ministers of the time. Furthermore, the Nigerian war coincided with the war over the Suez Canal, which lasted from October 29th to November 7th, 1956, and is also known as the second Arab-Israeli war, which saw Israel invade Egypt, followed by the United Kingdom and France.
Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, KG, OM, CH, TD, DL, FRS, RA was a British statesman, soldier, and writer who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945, and again from 1951 to 1955, during World War II.
Anthony Eden, full name Robert Anthony Eden, 1st Earl of Avon, Viscount Eden of Royal Leamington Spa, also known as Sir Anthony Eden (until 1961), was a British foreign secretary in 1935-38, 1940-45, and 1951-55, and prime minister from 1955 to 1957.
Baron Wilson of Rievaulx, KG, OBE, PC, FRS, FSS was a British politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, from October 1964 to June 1970 and again from March 1974 to April 1976.
I purposefully went down historical lane to list the individuals who led the British government during the bloody civil war in Nigeria, during which time significant incidents that could be considered war crimes were committed by the Nigerian side when schools, markets, and churches were bombed, resulting in hundreds of thousands of fatalities made up of children, women, and the elderly in the then Biafra Republic. Unfortunately, the United Nations should be blamed more than anyone else for the apparent silence on these war crimes, just as the British Government, not just the Monarch, should be called out.
Furthermore, the accusations made by professor Uju Anya against the queen, who has now died, can be subjected to a lot of interrogation based on the reality of the situation that the monarch in Britain is only the head of state but not the head of government, just as the elected parliament led by the prime minister or the head of government was responsible for carrying out government policies.
So how did professor Anya reached her conclusion?
Furthermore, as Africans, and particularly as Igbo, we are not permitted to speak ill of the sick, the dying, or the dead.
These raging debates sparked by the professor's tweets in the United States have also compelled some inquisitive Nigerian youth to make an effort to read in order to find out what really happened. broadly on the war's subject matter
As is well known, successive Nigerian governments have refused to allow schoolchildren unrestricted access to historical accounts of that war.
Sometime around May 2020, Mr. Innocent Chizaram Ilo, who lives in Lagos, published an article in Al Jazeera titled "The truth of what happened is denied, so we lose the opportunity to learn from it."
The following is a summary of his previously mentioned essay:
"The period between 1966 and 1970 is known in Nigerian history books as the Nigerian Civil War or the Nigerian Biafran War." But not naming it is an erasure of truth for those of us whose families lived through it. Genocide in Biafra
The death toll is estimated to be more than one million, with some putting it at more than two million. Some died as a result of the fighting, but the majority died as a result of hunger and disease caused by the Nigerian government's land and sea blockade, which resulted in famine.
Amarachi Iheke examines the case for and against classifying it as a genocide in The Republic, arguing that whether or not you believe it was a genocide, the conflict exposes "blind spots in our application of international human rights norms" and that "moving forward, as part of a national reconciliation project, it is necessary we embark on critical truth-seeking around Biafra's genocide claim."
However, the seeds of Nigeria's denial were sown on January 15, 1970, when Biafra agreed to a ceasefire and the war ended. Nigeria's Military Head of State, General Yakubi Gowon, declared that there was "no victor, no vanquished" in the conflict.
However, there was clearly a winner - the
The Nigerian government, which had regained control of the oil-rich region - and a defeated - the people of the now-defunct Republic of Biafra, on whose land the war had been fought, whose homes had been destroyed, whose relatives had died of starvation and disease, and their descendants who would have to navigate the world with the weight of their transgenerational trauma."
I learned nothing about what happened in Biafra in school. The reality was subtly removed from the curriculum, while those responsible were portrayed as national heroes who fought to keep Nigeria united. I attempted to reconcile the colorful images of these "national heroes" in my Social Studies books (history was removed from the basic curriculum in 2007) with my father's wartime experience."
I must confess that, as a child of Igbo parents who witnessed and participated in the war, I was similarly denied access to properly documented historical accounts of that war in school.
As the aforementioned essayist stated in his piece published by Aljazeera, most children from the former Eastern region learned about what happened during the war from their parents.
Then, on the British side, there has been a lot of backlash because of the British government's support for Nigeria during that war.
Frederick Forsyth is a British war correspondent who recently published an article titled "Buried for 50 Years: Britain's Shameful Role in the Biafra War."
He wrote as follows: "Being proud of one's country is a good thing, and I am - most of the time. However, it would be impossible to scan the centuries of British history without coming across a few incidents that inspire shame rather than pride. Among those I would mention is the establishment of the concentration camp in South Africa by British officials in order to persecute Boer families. Add to that the 1919 Amritsar massacre and the Hola camps established and run during the Mau Mau rebellion ".
"But there is one truly repulsive policy practiced by our government during the lifetime of anyone over the age of 50, and one word will suffice: Biafra.
"This referred to Nigeria's civil war, which ended 50 years ago this month. It arose from the decision of the people of that already riot-torn country's eastern region to declare independence as the Republic of Biafra. When I arrived as a BBC correspondent, I discovered that the Biafrans, mostly Igbos, had their reasons.
"The federal government in Lagos was a brutal military dictatorship that took power in a bloodbath in 1966." During and after the coup, the northern and western regions were swept by a pogrom that slaughtered thousands of Igbo residents. The federal government did nothing to assist. Yakubu Gowon, an affable British-educated colonel, led it. But he was a dummy. The true rulers were a group of colonels from northern Nigeria. The crisis worsened, and in early 1967, eastern Nigeria, which was home to approximately 1.8 million refugees, sought restitution. In Ghana, a British-organized conference was held, and a concordat was reached. When Gowon returned home, the colonels flatly contradicted him, tore up his terms, and reneged on the deal.
The Eastern Region formally seceded in April, and the federal government declared war on 7 July."
"Emeka" Ojukwu, the Eastern Region's Oxford-educated former military governor, led Biafra." London, ignoring all evidence that Lagos had broken the agreement, condemned the secession, made no attempt to mediate, and declared complete support for Nigeria.
On the third day of the war, I arrived in Enugu, the Biafra capital. Gerald Watrous, head of the BBC's West Africa Service, had briefed me extensively in London. What I didn't realize was that he was the government's Commonwealth Relations Office (CRO), which trusted every word of its high commissioner in Lagos, David Hunt. It took me two days in Enugu to realize that everything I'd been told was complete nonsense.
I'd been told that the brilliant Nigerian army would put down the rebellion in two to four weeks. Fortunately, Jim Parker, the deputy high commissioner in Enugu, informed me of what was going on. Our high commissioner in Lagos was the source of the nonsense believed by the CRO and the BBC. Hunt, a racist and snob, expected Africans to stand up when he entered the room, which Gowon did. Ojukwu did not attend their single prewar meeting. Hunt despised him right away." These are the thoughts of Frederick Forsyth, a British, about the same kind of rejection of the role of the United Kingdom in the Nigerian versus Biafran war.
The Guardian of Britain stated that "Nigeria is haunted by Biafran war," adding, "Chinua Achebe's new book There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra emerges into this landscape of memory and remembrance, 42 years after the war ended." In the book, Achebe, a few weeks before his 82nd birthday, finally sets out to tell the story of his Biafra. He uses an unusual format, a rambling mix of anecdotes, summarized histories, analysis, reportage, declamation, and haunting poetry. In some ways, reading the book feels like spending an hour or two chatting with the eminent novelist."
Nigeria came to be, thanks to his schooldays and blossoming friendships with prominent figures such as poet Christopher Okigbo, whose presence looms large throughout the novel. Interspersed throughout the historical account is the story of his father, one of the early Igbo Christians, and his experiences growing up with newly Christian, trailblazing parents caught between the Igbo people's old traditions and cosmology and the new Christianity. The personal glimpses into his early life are hugely enjoyable and tantalizing - often outlined so succinctly that the reader is left wanting more detail."
"Approaching the events leading up to the war - the descent of the first post-independence Nigerian government into an abyss of corruption and misrule; the role of the colonial government in laying the groundwork for this descent and the first military coup in 1966 - he adopts a less personal and more straightforward recounting tone. This continues until the book's conclusion, when he begins to describe the July 1966 counter-coup, the massacres of Igbos that followed the coup, the failed attempts at negotiating peace, the subsequent declaration of independence, and the harrowing consequences that followed."
"As is his right, Achebe does not pull any punches, though he does make some concessions to opposing viewpoints, particularly on the legacy of colonialism and the moral imperative on writers to produce committed literature. He is less sympathetic to the question of whether the Federal Government of Nigeria's actions during the war constituted war crimes and, possibly, genocide. He is meticulous in naming the officers and individuals responsible, and he provides their perspectives based on news and other reports whenever possible."
What has emerged from Professor Uju Anya's controversial tweets is that, while uncharitable and inappropriate, the lesson to be learned is that there is a lot of work that Nigeria needs to do to provide lasting redress to the injustices of the war years, and far more work that Western powers need to do on the issues of slavery and colonialism.
The ramblings of President Buhari's special assistant on new media in response to Professor Uju Anya's tweets are completely disjointed, illogical, and laughable.
This is because his boss, President Buhari, is possibly the only President of Nigeria who has carried out apartheid and divisive policies against the South, reopening wounds from the late 1960s war. Consider a Nigerian president today who had to borrow over $2 billion USD from China just to build a railway line to Niger Republic while failing to build the same in the entire old Eastern region. So, why is the young boy working for the Octogenarian President Muhammadu Buhari enraged that Professor Uju Anya wrote tweets condemning the British Monarchy for aiding and abetting genocide during the Biafran and Nigerian wars, when his boss, the President, has implemented policies that aren't dissimilar to carrying out economic genocide?
"Public attention is riveted on politics ahead of the 2023 polls," wrote a Punch newspaper editorial today. However, the electorate's dream of a better Nigeria appears bleak, given state governors' and leading politicians' recent embarrassing proclivity to travel to London for political meetings. Governors, presidential candidates from the major parties, and a former President, Olusegun Obasanjo, all flew to London for a series of meetings. They left the front, where insecurity, economic and social crises have made life difficult for the majority. The trend has been described as shameful by a group of elder statesmen.
Presidential candidates from the three major political parties are among those attending the London summit. The trio currently holds no public office and thus has complete freedom of movement. Not so for incumbents in public office. In London, the candidates met with some state governors, including Nyesom Wike (Rivers), Samuel Ortom (Benue), Okezie Ikpeazu (Abia), and Seyi Makinde (Oyo).
There is nothing legally wrong with visiting London, especially for private individuals. In or out of public office, freedom of movement remains a fundamental right. However, upon closer inspection, these are meetings where governors from states facing serious domestic challenges seek personal benefits after 2023 at the expense of the taxpayers. They had nothing to do with their official responsibilities or the general welfare of the people. It is embarrassing for a country that is not at war for its leaders to ostentatiously hold meetings in foreign territories to determine the country's trajectory..." One quick thought from today's Punch newspaper editorial is to demand that Professor Uju Anya and millions of oppressed Nigerians be more concerned about the deplorable situation to which Nigeria and Nigerians are subjected under President Muhammadu Buhari's government and allow the departed Queen of England to take her well-deserved peaceful rest.
EMMANUEL ONWUBIKO is head of the HUMAN RIGHTS WRITERS ASSOCIATION OF NIGERIA (HURIWA) and one time National commissioner of the NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION OF NIGERIA.
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