Mean-spirited comments are common. We vent. Sometimes we vent with reasons unknown to others. In one now notable episode of venting, a side story became a rather widespread news story. The story centers on a particularly mean comment on the death of Queen Elizabeth by Carnegie Mellon Associate Professor Uju Anya, Twitter took down her words, but not before her tweat attracted the attention of others, including Jeff Bezos, who took them up as a point of departure to criticize her.
Professor Anya wrote, "I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,”
In reply, Jeff Bezos wrote, "This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don't think so. Wow!”
And the University wrote, “We do not condone the offensive and objectionable messages posted by Uju Anya today on her personal social media account. Free expression is core to the mission of higher education, however, the views she shard absolutely do not represent the values of the institution, nor the standards of discourse we seek to foster.”
In a followup, Anya wrote, “If anyone expects me to express anything but 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, you can keep wishing upon a star.” And, not shy about expressing the her feelings, she also wrote with regard to Bezos,“Otoro gba gbue gi” which means “May you rot by your putrid bowels and die from uncontrollable diarrhea.”
Anya’s anger is a private matter, of course. Only she can know the depth and the true origin of her feelings. Her comment that the British government “massacred and displaced half my family” might be rooted in those well-documented nineteenth century conflicts between Britain and various “Nigerian” tribes. But there’s always a potential for irony in human endeavors.
After 1807 and the British abolition of slavery, the Brits sent their navy to stop the slave trade along the West Coast of Africa, the admiralty operating at first out of Fernando Po and sending the people they freed from slavers to Freetown in Sierra Leone. That seeming moral action by the government was followed in 1849 by a rather aggressive takeover of the land now known as Nigeria, which was a source of palm oil. So, the British stopped the slave trade in the region, but then decimated indigenous people in a colonial expansion. Dogooders became dobadders, at least from the perspective of those they fought.
According to an account by Toyin Falola in Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria, one of the flashpoints of violence in the country occurred in 1836 when an English warship stopped four Spanish ships on the Bonny River to free people bound for slavery. * In the short version, the British ship was then captured because the native warlords saw a cessation to their lucrative slave trading—yes, “Nigerians” sold themselves into slavery. The British responded by recapturing their own ship and bombarding those who had captured it. And since the palm oil trade was becoming more important as a replacement for human trafficking, the Colonial power sent more ships and military to secure the region and that trade. Snowballs gathering snow as they roll downhill can’t be found in Nigeria, but the snowball effect occurred in reverse. The British began rolling up the Niger and other rivers gathering more control as they went, invariably at the expense of the native peoples who resisted British expansion. In those skirmishes native Nigerians were killed and displaced. That, regardless of the initial effort to save Africans from slavery, was in itself a morally unjustifiable action.
Without having a conversation with Uju Anya, I believe that those conflicts might have served as the background to her claim about “half my family.” Like so many other of the African diaspora, she resents her history and places the blame on those who enslaved and conquered, and she seems to assume that Queen Elizabeth, a twentieth-century monarch, was somehow responsible. For her role in what her ancestors did, the Queen didn’t apologize, but I believe somewhere along her life’s royal journey, she supposedly acknowledged Britain’s role in colonialism. I assume, however, that even had she apologized, she would not have ingratiated herself in the heart of Anya. As I wrote above, there’s always a chance of irony in human endeavors. Anya seems to pay little attention to the full history of the land of her birth. That “Nigerians” sold “Nigerians” into slavery was a major cause of human displacement. And pre-colonial “Nigerians” had their own territorial wars that pitted Africans against Africans.
So, if Professor Anya considers Britain a cause of her ancestors’ woes, she seems to have an argument, but she might also have an incomplete sense of history. Africans sold Africans into slavery, so shouldn’t she be railing against Africans? Maybe she knows something about the specifics of her ancestry that the rest of us do not know, maybe something about a specific British action against specific members of her family. That is certainly possible. A little ambivalence might also be justifiable.
Given the protections afforded by the First Amendment, no one needs to show concern over the words of Professor Anya. She’s free to say what she pleases though I might note that if the Queen had been a black person and a white person made Anya’s comments, the flames of hate burning on Twitter would have been a conflagration.
As circumstances are, there is no calming resolution to the war of words when the cause of the war is itself a partial mystery. Anya is free to seethe and to vent. If she could only go back in time to address the perpetrators, things would probably be different. I have a tendency to believe that nineteenth century George III, George IV, William IV, and Victoria were more to blame than twentieth- and twenty-first century Elizabeth. And if the sins of the past are to be carried by grudges in ensuing centuries ad infinitum, then those African slave-traders and warlords avariciously selling their own into slavery should also be subject to mean-spirited messaging. How else should we handle the bitterness?
And handling the full generational bitterness would entail casting aspersions against people of African origin as well as those of European origin. As Kevin Sieff of The Washington Post summarizes (18 Jan 2018), “For over 200 years, powerful kings in what is now the country of Benin captured and sold slaves to Portuguese, French and British merchants. The slaves were usually men, women and children from rival tribes — gagged and jammed into boats bound for Brazil, Haiti and the United States.” **
As I wrote above, Professor Anya is free to harbor her grudge against a privileged white monarch who never officially apologized for nineteenth-century British colonialism. God save the mean. Imagine a world without them, a world in which Israelis and Palestinians would no longer harbor grudges that result in destruction, injury, displacement, and death; without them the Hutus and Tutsis would no longer harbor grudges that result in destruction, injury, displacement, and death; without them the Sunni and the Shia would no longer harbor grudges that result in destruction, injury, displacement, and death; without them every twenty-first century person enslaved by the Soviets would harbor no grudges over their parents’ and grandparents’ twentieth-century imprisonment, displacement, injuries, and deaths, no Chinese would harbor grudges against World War II’s Imperial Japanese, and no descendant of a Holocaust survivor would harbor a grudge against Germans; no…
I think you get the point; The mean continue the meanness. In fact, maybe social media should adopt this version of the English acclamation as a motto: God save the mean.
*Falola, Toyin. 2009. Indiana University Press. Bloomington.
**Online at “An African country reckons with its history of selling slaves.” See also an article by Adobe Tricia Nwaubani in The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2019, entitled “When the Slave Traders Were African.”
Professor Anya wrote, "I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,”
In reply, Jeff Bezos wrote, "This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don't think so. Wow!”
And the University wrote, “We do not condone the offensive and objectionable messages posted by Uju Anya today on her personal social media account. Free expression is core to the mission of higher education, however, the views she shard absolutely do not represent the values of the institution, nor the standards of discourse we seek to foster.”
In a followup, Anya wrote, “If anyone expects me to express anything but 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, you can keep wishing upon a star.” And, not shy about expressing the her feelings, she also wrote with regard to Bezos,“Otoro gba gbue gi” which means “May you rot by your putrid bowels and die from uncontrollable diarrhea.”
Anya’s anger is a private matter, of course. Only she can know the depth and the true origin of her feelings. Her comment that the British government “massacred and displaced half my family” might be rooted in those well-documented nineteenth century conflicts between Britain and various “Nigerian” tribes. But there’s always a potential for irony in human endeavors.
After 1807 and the British abolition of slavery, the Brits sent their navy to stop the slave trade along the West Coast of Africa, the admiralty operating at first out of Fernando Po and sending the people they freed from slavers to Freetown in Sierra Leone. That seeming moral action by the government was followed in 1849 by a rather aggressive takeover of the land now known as Nigeria, which was a source of palm oil. So, the British stopped the slave trade in the region, but then decimated indigenous people in a colonial expansion. Dogooders became dobadders, at least from the perspective of those they fought.
According to an account by Toyin Falola in Colonialism and Violence in Nigeria, one of the flashpoints of violence in the country occurred in 1836 when an English warship stopped four Spanish ships on the Bonny River to free people bound for slavery. * In the short version, the British ship was then captured because the native warlords saw a cessation to their lucrative slave trading—yes, “Nigerians” sold themselves into slavery. The British responded by recapturing their own ship and bombarding those who had captured it. And since the palm oil trade was becoming more important as a replacement for human trafficking, the Colonial power sent more ships and military to secure the region and that trade. Snowballs gathering snow as they roll downhill can’t be found in Nigeria, but the snowball effect occurred in reverse. The British began rolling up the Niger and other rivers gathering more control as they went, invariably at the expense of the native peoples who resisted British expansion. In those skirmishes native Nigerians were killed and displaced. That, regardless of the initial effort to save Africans from slavery, was in itself a morally unjustifiable action.
Without having a conversation with Uju Anya, I believe that those conflicts might have served as the background to her claim about “half my family.” Like so many other of the African diaspora, she resents her history and places the blame on those who enslaved and conquered, and she seems to assume that Queen Elizabeth, a twentieth-century monarch, was somehow responsible. For her role in what her ancestors did, the Queen didn’t apologize, but I believe somewhere along her life’s royal journey, she supposedly acknowledged Britain’s role in colonialism. I assume, however, that even had she apologized, she would not have ingratiated herself in the heart of Anya. As I wrote above, there’s always a chance of irony in human endeavors. Anya seems to pay little attention to the full history of the land of her birth. That “Nigerians” sold “Nigerians” into slavery was a major cause of human displacement. And pre-colonial “Nigerians” had their own territorial wars that pitted Africans against Africans.
So, if Professor Anya considers Britain a cause of her ancestors’ woes, she seems to have an argument, but she might also have an incomplete sense of history. Africans sold Africans into slavery, so shouldn’t she be railing against Africans? Maybe she knows something about the specifics of her ancestry that the rest of us do not know, maybe something about a specific British action against specific members of her family. That is certainly possible. A little ambivalence might also be justifiable.
Given the protections afforded by the First Amendment, no one needs to show concern over the words of Professor Anya. She’s free to say what she pleases though I might note that if the Queen had been a black person and a white person made Anya’s comments, the flames of hate burning on Twitter would have been a conflagration.
As circumstances are, there is no calming resolution to the war of words when the cause of the war is itself a partial mystery. Anya is free to seethe and to vent. If she could only go back in time to address the perpetrators, things would probably be different. I have a tendency to believe that nineteenth century George III, George IV, William IV, and Victoria were more to blame than twentieth- and twenty-first century Elizabeth. And if the sins of the past are to be carried by grudges in ensuing centuries ad infinitum, then those African slave-traders and warlords avariciously selling their own into slavery should also be subject to mean-spirited messaging. How else should we handle the bitterness?
And handling the full generational bitterness would entail casting aspersions against people of African origin as well as those of European origin. As Kevin Sieff of The Washington Post summarizes (18 Jan 2018), “For over 200 years, powerful kings in what is now the country of Benin captured and sold slaves to Portuguese, French and British merchants. The slaves were usually men, women and children from rival tribes — gagged and jammed into boats bound for Brazil, Haiti and the United States.” **
As I wrote above, Professor Anya is free to harbor her grudge against a privileged white monarch who never officially apologized for nineteenth-century British colonialism. God save the mean. Imagine a world without them, a world in which Israelis and Palestinians would no longer harbor grudges that result in destruction, injury, displacement, and death; without them the Hutus and Tutsis would no longer harbor grudges that result in destruction, injury, displacement, and death; without them the Sunni and the Shia would no longer harbor grudges that result in destruction, injury, displacement, and death; without them every twenty-first century person enslaved by the Soviets would harbor no grudges over their parents’ and grandparents’ twentieth-century imprisonment, displacement, injuries, and deaths, no Chinese would harbor grudges against World War II’s Imperial Japanese, and no descendant of a Holocaust survivor would harbor a grudge against Germans; no…
I think you get the point; The mean continue the meanness. In fact, maybe social media should adopt this version of the English acclamation as a motto: God save the mean.
*Falola, Toyin. 2009. Indiana University Press. Bloomington.
**Online at “An African country reckons with its history of selling slaves.” See also an article by Adobe Tricia Nwaubani in The Wall Street Journal, September 20, 2019, entitled “When the Slave Traders Were African.”
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