AFRICA DIVIDED FACE THE DEATH OF ELIZABETH II

Some Africans have fond recollections of Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s oldest monarch, who got here to greet individuals in 20 nations throughout the continent throughout her 70-year reign.

Others, nevertheless, recalled humanitarian liabilities like Britain’s brutal crushing within the Nineteen Fifties of the Mau Mau revolt in Kenya, and the large diamond the Queen’s household acquired from South Africa. Colonial South in 1905, which she by no means returned regardless of calls to take action.

Nana Akufo-Addo, President of Ghana, the place the Queen visited in 1961, 4 years after it grew to become one of many first African nations to realize independence, lowered the flags and declared that Ghana was proud to be a part of the Commonwealth.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta, whose first title means freedom in Swahili and whose nation gained independence in 1963, known as it a“a towering icon of selfless service”.

However many had been much less passionate about celebrating the lifetime of a queen whose nation has had a checkered historical past in Africa.

Assist for a army dictatorship

Some Nigerians recalled Britain’s assist within the Nineteen Sixties for a army dictatorship that crushed the Biafra revolt. Igbo officers had launched the revolt in 1967, sparking a three-year civil warfare that killed greater than one million individuals, largely from hunger.

Uju Anya, an Igbo trainer and survivor of that warfare who now lives in the USA, sparked controversy when she wrote on Twitter Thursday night his “contempt for the monarch who oversaw a authorities that sponsored the genocide that slaughtered and displaced half my household and whose penalties these dwelling at this time are nonetheless attempting to beat.”

“We’re not mourning the loss of life of Elizabeth”stated the South African Marxist opposition celebration, the Financial Freedom Fighters, led by Julius Malema.

“Our interplay with Britain has been marked by ache, loss of life and dispossession, in addition to the dehumanization of the African individuals”he stated, itemizing the atrocities dedicated by British forces within the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Regardless of this view of herself, Elizabeth solid a detailed relationship with the late South African chief Nelson Mandela, the primary post-apartheid president, and visited South Africa twice after the tip of white minority rule. .

Elizabeth was simply 25 and was visiting Kenya together with her husband Philip when she discovered of the loss of life of her father, King George VI, and his accession to the throne on February 6, 1952.

In the meantime, King Charles’s accession to the throne has sparked renewed calls from politicians and activists for former Caribbean colonies to strip the monarch of the position of their head of state and for Britain to pay reparations for slavery.