Queen Elizabeth II: Were her life and reign not a symbol of oppression?

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Diaspora Despatch

By LaBode Obanor

Most African nations, many of whom are less than seventy years old (this is how long the Queen reigned), may not feign paramnesia, nor should they be confused about the complicated reign of the British monarch. I bet they know her rule was spurious but will not admit it.

More so, they may be conflicted because of their membership in the post-colonial club—the Commonwealth, but what good is this invented ring of nations if not to perpetrate the British post-colonial dominance? That is a subject for another day.

We know the Queen supervised the later years of the U.K.’s imperialism and the decade after. Notably, marred in oppression, injudicious violence, and independence. Thus, it is unlikely that Africa will fully extricate herself from this trauma because 70 years later, many still suffer from “colonial mentality.” Not just because it is recent memory but because these periods have defined the continent of Africa for generations as she still stays bent under the weight and effect of the British colonial rule.

Why much of Africa remains a pariah in the world sixty-plus years after independence from Elizabeth II is a topic for another day. First, we bid her farewell and demystified her reign.

Although deodorized to reflect a tolerant monarch, her legacy still carries the stench of imperialism, subjugation, and dominance. We haven’t forgotten how she established her tottering episcopacy in Nigeria via pseudo-independence and sowed the dragon’s teeth of civil war in the country a few short years later.

Cultivated in the bloodline and palace of colonists, exploiters, and human enslavers. Her father, king George VI, Grandfather George I, Great Grandfather Edward VII, etc., and throughout the dynasty, all prospered in other humans’ sweat, lash, and blood. And, of course we must not fail to mention the loots from Africa and Asia to the Americas.

When she was crowned Queen on the second of June 1953, she was predisposed to the predatorial tendencies of her forefathers and was hellbent on following their ways. But her vision of a continued ransacked and exploited future for Africa was upended when Pan-Africanism swept the continent. The Pan-African movement occasioned the challenge to the ethos of the then veiny British behemoth under Elizabeth. More of this below.

We are not deluded into pointing out that the Crown’s system of inherited “head of state” made her manifestly and inextricably connected to the slave trade and colonial conquests of the British since the inception of chattel slavery in the 15th century. When she assumed the throne, no single African country was free from British hegemony, and she ardently vowed to toll the path of the kings before her such that, as a princess, she signaled what her reign would look like.

In her speech to South Africans on her 21st birthday, she said:
“I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, I shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”

“To our great imperial family?” yes, she called the dejected, oppressed Africans and their white oppressors one “great imperial” happy family. As if the subjugated Africans are joyous to be in their abject and tyrannized state that they don’t mind being in brotherhood with their abductor.

While she benefited from the pillages gathered in these dark periods until her passing, she never regretted the colonial past of the Crown.

In the early to mid-1900s, leading to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, some Africans in the homeland, Jomo Kenyatta (Kenya), Kwame Nkrumah (Gold Coast now Ghana), Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria), and others in the diaspora like Martin Delany, W.E.B Dubois, Marcus Garvey, etc., began to envision a unified African nation where all Africans can cohabitate, not alongside the whites, but alone due to the people’s shared commonalities. Many African countries seized the opportunity to begin marshaling a path to independence.

When Elizabeth II ascended the throne, she copiously continued her hold on the Africans unabated for years 0until it became apparent that the determined Africans were serious about breaking the hold of colonialism.

So, in March 1957, after recognizing that colonialism was not sustainable, she reluctantly let the first Nation, Ghana, go. Soon after, it was cascading as a barrage of others quickly negotiated their independence, including Nigeria.

Suppose Queen Elizabeth II was a reformer who ruled with aplomb and grace and laid a plan for independence like the media now portrays her. Why did she never acknowledge the monarchy’s historical role in support of the transatlantic slave trade? Is she deserving of the pious platitudes on an endless loop on our tv screens as if the world has lost a “godsend”?     Yet this same autarch (titular head until her death) never apologizes for the human suffering melted on the Africans during the prolonged period of cruel and unjust treatment of the indigenous Africans.

Queen Elizabeth II is not blameless for the transgressions of the Crown. Her plutocratic reign is “overfilled” with wealth amassed through human enslavement, indentured servitude, dispossession, and colonial loot. Because of the British monarchs’ role in widespread human rights abuses, the monarchy is inherently “racist by default.” And anyone who merrily embraces and accedes that royal seat is guilty of the veniality and sins of the throne.

Thus, no one, including the media, is permitted to rebrand or immortalize her. If they do, they should be called out for it.

While the British press, including the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), may choose the route of “revisionist history” and portray a myth of a puritan who held the people together, the nations in the Commonwealth who suffered under her sustained weight of humiliation are not allowed to do so. We will not allow history to be airbrushed or simply sugarcoated.

We only hope that her successor, King Charles III, will offer the long overdue apology to Africa and begin to remedy the injustice of the British monarchy. We shall see.

 

Email: JlaBode74@gmail.com

Twitter: @Obanor

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