By Ngala Hansel
It’s hardly been 24 hours since the Queen of England, Elizabeth II passed on to glory at the golden age of 96 but a lot has happened already. Her 73-year old son was immediately named King and has chosen the regnal name of King Charles III.
The Queen had for the most part, been in good health and only yesterday, it was announced that the monarch was “comfortable” at her Scottish home of Balmoral – her private castle in Scotland, though doctors remained “concerned” for her worsening condition.
So what was Queen Elizabeth II’s relationship with Cameroon and Africa?
The Queen visited Africa several times, starting in her early 20s while she was still a princess. She was in South Africa when she turned 21 and also, a few years later was in Kenya when she received news that her father King George VI had passed on in 1952. The Queen was 25 at the time.
During 70 years as queen, she toured Africa several times, making trips to South Africa, Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda, but since Cameroon joined the Commonwealth in 1995, she did not ever visit Cameroon.
The closest link she had with Cameroon was through meeting Cameroonian scholars who were selected to study in UK universities under the auspices of the Queen’s Commonwealth Scholarship programme. In May 1985 however, President paul Biya and wife Irene Biya visited Buckingham Palace and again in March 2004, Biya visited with Chantal Biya.
What is her legacy?
As would be expected, the queen’s passing has not failed to generate some backlash from critics even in her death. While she was not responsible for colonizing Africa, some see her office as responsible for the slavery that enriched the British empire. One of them is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in the US. Nigerian-born Prof. Uju Anya said that she hoped the queen would have an “excruciating death”.
Her tweet went viral prompting thousands of responses – one of which was from Bezos who condemned her words and criticised her for having a lack of empathy and respect for the dead.
Taking to her Twitter page shortly before the queen’s passing was announced, Anya wrote:
“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating”.
She later added:
“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” she tweeted.
On his part, firebrand South African opposition leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party stated that the queen was “head of an institution built up, sustained and living off a brutal legacy of dehumanization of millions of people across the world” and was very categorical in stating that “We do not mourn the death of Elizabeth, because to us her death is a reminder of a very tragic period in this country and Africa’s history.
However, Cameroon’s Paul Biya who is in his 40th year in power after changing the constitution several times to stay in power – was however full of praises for Queen Elizabeth who was only 30 years more in office than him:
“I bow to the memory of this illustrious Sovereign with an exceptional destiny, whose reign marked the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century”, and also claiming that “Her Majesty Elizabeth II was much loved by the British people, and particularly respected abroad”.
The reality on the ground is different. Several former British colonies or those still under the crown have been seeking to sever ties with the British monarchy. Barbados was the most recent. In November 2021, the island nation of Barbados removed the Queen as its head of state and became a republic. In an overnight ceremony in the capital, Bridgetown; Dame Sandra Mason was sworn in as president. In a speech, Prince Charles (now King Charles III) acknowledged the “appalling atrocity of slavery” the Caribbean island nation suffered.
Before Barbados, the last nation to remove the Queen as head of state was the East African island of Mauritius in 1992.
The Queen’s legacy is certainly mired in controversy because Britain became a wealthy nation and superpower in large part due to slavery.
According to some historians, the British Raj (the term for British rule in India), some 35 million Indians lost their lives under British rule. Some Indian scholars argue that the 1943 Bengal famine was a calculated move by the then British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to kill Indians for resisting British rule. As many as 3 million Indians are estimated to have died in the famine as Indian politician and writer, Shashi Tharoor argues that “Churchill deliberately ordered the diversion of food from starving Indian civilians to well-supplied British soldiers and even to top up European stockpiles, meant for yet-to-be-liberated Greeks and Yugoslavs”.
According to John Gunther, some 5 to 8 million Africans lost their lives as a result of British imperialism in Africa.
And while Queen Elizabeth II is being mourned, it is important for British people to also understand the pain that other nations went through while their country was being enriched by the labour and blood of the people conquered by the British crown.
In fact, Wayne Dooling, professor of History of Southern Africa, SOAS, University of London notes that:
“Especially lacking is an understanding of how the British empire might appear from the perspective of the people who were conquered. The British empire is often seen as a force for good, as one that put an end to slavery and the slave trade, liberated foreign peoples from the tyranny of their rulers, replaced despotism with the rule of law and introduced millions to literacy, western medicine, commerce and Christianity. There are those in Britain today who greatly admire empire-builders such as Cecil Rhodes for their “sheer ambition, work ethic and self-belief”.
But the reality of empire was rather more complex and substantially less benign. The legacy of the British empire is more than a balance sheet of debits and credits.
A narrowly focused school history curriculum means that most Britons grow up with a limited knowledge of the history of the British empire and about the consequences for indigenous peoples in foreign lands. A view of the empire as essentially benign easily feeds into the sensibilities of a nation that believes itself to be bound by the rules of “fair play”.
Yes, the British colonized Africa, India and parts of the Carribean but it was far from an unequal relationship with the colonized, Queen Elizabeth II’s passing should be a time of reckoning across the United Kingdom.
