By Melissa Koenig For Dailymail.Com
A “best-selling Nigerian author,” Reno Omokri, has slammed Carnegie Mellon Professor, Uju Anya, for saying the Queen ignited the Nigerian Civil War – branding her comments ‘propaganda and pseudo history.’
Reno Omokri, who is also a priest and now lives in San Francisco, said he was ‘absolutely mortified’ by the ‘hideous’ claims Uju Anya aired on Wednesday night.
He wrote: “It showed she was ignorant of the country’s history that has been ‘distorted’ and warped into creating bitterness in those who have not studied it properly.”
Anya, who last week said she hoped the Queen died an ‘excruciating death’, took to a podcast to sling even more vicious attacks at the late Queen just days after she died in Scotland aged 96.
The linguistics professor at the Pittsburgh-based university bizarrely suggested the monarch was directly responsible for the death of millions during the Nigerian Civil War.
She also slammed the royal – who is being mourned by millions across the world, including in the African nation – for wearing what she claimed were ‘blood diamonds’ and said she sat on a ‘throne of blood’.
Omokri wrote in an op-ed that Anya must not understand Nigerian history — nor the ceremonial role the Queen played in British government if she believes that.
‘I was absolutely mortified by the hideous and historically inaccurate things that were said about the Queen and her family by a Nigerian woman living in America, whose name I will not dignify by mentioning,’ he wrote.
‘Let me tackle what the death of Queen Elizabeth II reveals about Biafra,’ he continued, referring to the once-separatist state.
‘It shows us as a people, we are not aware of our history, and because we are not aware of our own history, we have distorted it, such that propaganda and pseudo history has been orally passed down from one generation to another, feeding unfounded bitterness that is destroying those who harbor it, and having no effect on those whom they are embittered.’
Anya has said her tweet last Thursday attacking the late Royal as the ‘chief monarch of a thieving, raping genocidal empire,’ and wishing that ‘her pain be excruciating’ was an ’emotional outburst’ because she was ‘triggered’ by the Queen’s death.
Before she was born, she told The Guardian, her mother had to flee Nigeria during a civil war in which Biafra separatists sought autonomy for Nigeria’s Igbo people — an ethnic minority from the country’s south who faced persecution and pogroms in the north.
The UK government sided with its counterparts in Nigeria, supplying the government with guns to fight off the separatists in a deadly war that ended after more than 30 months.
Half of Anya’s family members died in the tragedy, she explained.
But Queen Elizabeth II did not have anything to do with the arms deal, Omokri pointed out in his op-ed on Thursday, as she only served a ceremonial role in the UK government.
‘Please let us stop pretending as if the late Queen Elizabeth II came to Nigeria and ignited a war,’ he wrote, saying it was instead ‘ignited by a series of unfortunate events that began with the cold blooded murder of 22 people from the Northern, Western and Midwestern region by people of mostly Eastern region origin, which led to a counter-coup by Northern Nigerian military officers on July 29, 1966, and the unfortunate pogrom of’66-’67.
‘It is only those who are ignorant about how the British government works that will blame the late Queen for the actions of the British government,’ he continued.
‘She was a titular and ceremonial head of state, whose actions were limited to appointing the candidate who has won election directly or indirectly as prime minister, and declaring open the government.
‘She was a symbol,’ Omokri asserted. ‘She was not the initiator of the policies of the British government.
‘And even the British government is not to blame for the Nigerian Civil War,’ he said. ‘We must learn to take responsibility for our own actions. That was the result of the ill-advised January 15, 1966 coup.
‘These are the facts that we all should address, rather than blaming Queen Elizabeth II for a war she did not cause, not had any way of stopping.
‘We have all forgiven and moved on,’ Omokri concluded. ‘Yet, you want to reopen these old wounds and make them cancerous by blaming Queen Elizabeth II 50 years after the war? Leave the woman and her family to grieve in peace.’
He added: ‘By celebrating the Queen’s death, you are giving Nigeria a very nasty reputation that will affect all of us, not only you.
‘We cannot afford to be seen as a nation with anti-British and American sentiments, when we are not able to get a better deal from China and Russia.’
First published in Daily Mail (UK)
