On a continent where Britain once controlled more than half the land, several Africans voiced conflicted views about the queen and her country’s colonial heritage as condolences from across the globe poured in after Queen Elizabeth’s passing.
Some people had pleasant recollections of Britain’s longest-reigning queen, who visited audiences in 20 different nations across the continent throughout her 70-year reign and smiled and waved.
Others, however, remembered events like the ruthless British suppression of Kenya’s Mau Mau uprising in the 1950s as the British Empire came to an end, and a sizable diamond that the queen’s family had taken from colonial South Africa in 1905 but never returned, despite requests.
When Elizabeth received the news of her father King George VI’s death and her ascension to the throne on February 6, 1952, she was just 25 years old and visiting Kenya with her husband Philip.
She would visit Africa as queen several times.
I was a small child in elementary school when the queen visited Uganda in 1954. She was a young, little lady who had a very modest demeanour.
She was really admirable and cheerful, an 84-year-old retired postal worker named Vincent Rwosire told Reuters.
He told a reporter over the phone from Mbarara in western Uganda, “We could not imagine that such a young lady could have so much authority.”
Four years after being one of the first African countries to achieve independence, Ghana’s President Nana Akufo-Addo, whose country the queen visited in 1961, lowered flags and said Ghana was happy to be a member of the Commonwealth.
She was referred to as “a towering emblem of selfless devotion” by Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose first name is Swahili for “freedom” and whose nation earned independence in 1963.
However, many people had mixed feelings about honouring the life of a king whose nation had a troubled past in Africa.
The opposition EFF party in South Africa said, “We do not grieve the death of Elizabeth.”
It listed the atrocities done by British troops in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and said, “Our connection with Britain has been one of misery,… murder and dispossession, and of the dehumanisation of the African people.”
Despite this perception of her, Elizabeth had a strong friendship with the first president of South Africa after apartheid, the late Nelson Mandela, and made two trips there after white minority rule ended.
She was a passionate supporter of the 56-nation Commonwealth, the majority of which were once British possessions.
Some Nigerians remembered how Britain had backed a military government in the 1960s that put an end to the Biafra revolt in the country’s east.
In 1967, Igbo officers started the uprising, which led to a three-year civil war that resulted in the deaths of more than one million people, largely due to starvation.
Igbo professor and war survivor Uju Anya, who now calls the US home, stirred up debate on Thursday night when she wrote on Twitter about her “disdain for the monarch who supervised 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.”
Although her posts received 67 000 “likes,” Carnegie Mellon University disassociated itself from them, calling them “offensive and repulsive” in a statement.
Since the monarchy in Britain primarily serves as a symbolic institution, even though the queen technically nominated prime ministers and met with them often, she did not decide policy.
King Charles’ ascension to the throne, in the meantime, has prompted fresh demands from politicians and campaigners for former Caribbean colonies to depose the king as their head of state and for Britain to make up for slavery reparations.