Johannesburg/Kampala – As tributes flowed in from around the world following the death of Queen Elizabeth, several Africans voiced conflicting views about the monarch and her country’s colonial heritage on a continent where Britain once dominated over half the territory.
During her 70-year reign, the longest-reigning queen of the United Kingdom smiled and waved at crowds in 20 countries across the continent.
Others, however, recalled Britain’s ruthless 1950s suppression of Kenya’s Mau Mau insurrection as the sun set on Britain’s empire, as well as a massive diamond the queen’s family obtained from colonial South Africa in 1905, which she never returned despite appeals for her to do so.
Elizabeth learned of her father King George VI’s death and her ascension to the throne on February 6, 1952, when she was 25 years old while visiting Kenya with her husband, Philip.
She would return to Africa multiple times as queen.
“When the queen visited Uganda in 1954, I was an elementary school student. She was a young, petite woman who appeared really modest. Vincent Rwosire, an 84-year-old retired postman, told Reuters that she was extremely admirable and smiling.
“We could not imagine that a woman so young could wield so much authority,” he said by phone from Mbarara, western Uganda.
President Nana Akufo-Addo of Ghana, whose nation the queen visited in 1961, four years after it became one of the first African nations to gain independence, lowered flags and stated that Ghana was proud to be a member of the Commonwealth.
President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose Swahili first name means “freedom” and whose country attained independence in 1963, spoke to her as “a towering image of unselfish service.”
Many, though, were less thrilled about commemorating the life of a monarch whose country has a tumultuous history in Africa.
South Africa’s opposition party, the EFF, stated, “We do not mourn Elizabeth’s death.”
“Our contact with Britain has been one of suffering,… murder and dispossession, and the dehumanization of the African people,” it stated, enumerating British crimes committed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Elizabeth formed a close friendship with the late South African leader Nelson Mandela, the first post-apartheid president, and visited South Africa twice after the end of white minority rule despite this perception.
She was an ardent supporter of the Commonwealth of 56 nations, the majority of which were formerly British colonies.
Some Nigerians recalled Britain’s assistance for a military government in the 1960s that suppressed the Biafra revolt in the country’s east. Officers of the Igbo ethnic group instigated the uprising in 1967, resulting in a three-year civil war that resulted in the deaths of over one million people, primarily due to starvation.
Uju Anya, an Igbo professor and survivor of that war who now resides in the United States, sparked controversy on Thursday night when she posted on Twitter 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 struggling to overcome.”
If anyone wants me to express anything other than contempt for the king who supervised a government that promoted the genocide that slaughtered and displaced half of my family and whose repercussions are still being overcome by those who are still alive today, they are wishing upon a star.
— Uju Anya (@UjuAnya) September 8, 2022
Her comments were “liked” 67,000 times, but Carnegie Mellon University distanced itself from them, calling them “offensive and unpleasant” in a statement.
While the queen technically nominated prime ministers and spoke with them on a regular basis, she did not influence policy decisions because the monarchy of the United Kingdom is primarily symbolic.
Meanwhile, the ascension of King Charles has reignited calls from politicians and activists for former Caribbean colonies to remove the monarch as their head of state and for Britain to pay reparations for slavery.