I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,” Anya had tweeted.
United States-based Nigerian professor Uju Anya has said the British Government funded the massacre of three million Igbo people during the Nigerian Civil War.
Prof Anya on hearing the news of the deteriorating health of the Queen last Thursday before her eventual death made a controversial tweet which the management of the microblogging app later deleted, saying it violated its rules.
“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,” Anya had tweeted.
However, despite the deletion of the tweet by Twitter, it continued to generate heated debate with many tweeps condemning her outburst while many others defended her.
Reacting to Anya's tweet, the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos wrote, “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better?”
“I don’t think so. Wow."
But the Carnegie Mellon University professor who quickly defended her tweet responded to Bezos, writing, "Otoro gba gbue gi (Dysentery kill you). May everyone you and your merciless greed have harmed in this world remember you as fondly as I remember my colonisers.”
Meanwhile, during an interview with The Cut, Anya explained that she made the comments due to the roles played by the late British monarch in ensuring Igbo people were the major casualties of the Nigerian Civil War, also known as the Biafran War (1967-1970).
Justifying tweets, Anya said, "My experience of who she was, and the British government she supervised, is a very painful one. The harm shaped my entire life and continues to be my story and that of the people she harmed — that her government harmed, that her kingdom harmed, however, you want to frame it. The genocide of the Biafra killed 3 million Igbo people, and the British government wasn’t just in political support of the people who perpetrated this massacre; they directly funded it. They gave it political cover and legitimacy.
"This wasn’t just something I just read about. I was born to colonial subjects on both sides of the family — one parent from Trinidad, where the British enslaved people, and one parent from Nigeria. They met in England at university and moved back to Nigeria after independence in 1960. My parents were survivors of this genocide.
"My three siblings, two of them under the age of 10 at the time, were survivors. My mother was pregnant with my brother, who was born during that time; he was a war baby. This was the legacy I was born into in 1976. I spent the first ten years of my life living in Nigeria, and there was always this spectre of who was lost."
"My earliest memories were from living in a war-torn area, and rebuilding still hasn’t finished even today. Half of my family was slaughtered with guns and bombs that this queen sent to kill us," she added.