There Was Nothing Admirable About Queen Elizabeth.

medium.comSept 9, 2022Read original

Unless you admire colonialism, Apartheid and slavery.

There is a great whitewashing of Queen Elizabeth’s legacy going on all over the media right now. She is being presented as a friend of Black people and a tireless “advocate” for Africans.

In fact, the BBC is out with a tweet brazenly claiming the queen had a “longstanding relationship with Africa”. The tweet is accompanied by captioned video montage that tries to paint the Queen as a friend of Africa and Africans.

She was the colonizer of Africa. As in, she was not just a direct beneficiary of looting done by the colonialist British Empire. She was the actual head of that empire.

That is right. For the first two decades of her reign, the queen was the HEAD of the colonialist British Empire.

White Brits have been trying to gloss over this fact by claiming the Queen’s colonialist reign was benign and magnanimous; by claiming her colonialist reign was much better than her predecessors’. They claim the Queen’s reign was marked by respect for human rights of the colonized. Imagine the mental gymnastics it takes to put colonization and respect for human rights in the same sentence.

You can’t be a colonizer and at the same time respect the human rights of the people you colonize. It is contradictory. Colonialism and respect for human rights are mutually exclusive.

Even if you subscribe to the cognitively discordant idea that colonialism could be pro-human rights, there is no evidence that the queen’s reign was any better from her predecessors’ reigns.

During her reign, the British CONTINUED plundering trillions from Africa. During her reign, the British CONTINUED looting and impoverishing Africa as they had done under previous British monarchs. In fact, in someways her reign was worse than her predecessors’.

Take, for instance,

unleashed on Kenyans during The Mau Mau Uprising in Kenya. The Queen’s colonizers savagely tortured Kenyan men, women AND children. They sodomized freedom fighters with broken glasses. They cut fingers of little children. They raped women and girls. They interned hundreds and thousands of Kenyans.

But the colonization of Africa and the brutal suppression of anti-colonialism movements are not the only legacies white Brits are tying to rewrite out of the Queen’s story. They are also trying to paint her as an advocate for Black South Africans during Apartheid.

In reality, the queen was actually a very enthusiastic supporter of Apartheid. In fact, the

in APARTHEID South Africa. The queen (at that time Princess Liz) was not there to protest Apartheid. She was not there to use diplomacy to pressure the Apartheid rulers to stop their cruelty against Black South Africans.

She was there as a GUEST OF HONOR of the Apartheid rulers. She was there to openly and proudly support Apartheid. And Liz and Family continued to support Apartheid well into the 1970s. They only stopped doing so when it became unfashionable to be an open Apartheid sympathizer.

And that 21st birthday speech that white Brits have been upholding as one of the greatest speech is actually one of the most racist you could ever watch. In the speech, Liz praises the genocidal British Empire as the best thing to happen to humanity.

Imagine being an African at that time and listening to the daughter of the very man who colonized your land telling you how wonderful it was to be colonized and brutalized and how she looked forward to continuing the subjugation of you and your descendants.

So, really, there is nothing to admire about Queen Elizabeth. She was a despicable human being whose lasting legacy is the brutalization of Black people.

That is why demanding Black people to celebrate her “life” is gross.

Demanding Black people “put their emotion” aside for a few days and just mourn a colonizer’s death is truly despicable. Demanding that we see the humanity of a woman under whose reign millions of Africans were colonized and brutalized is just gross.

Racist colonizers don’t stop being deplorable just because they died.