© Numero Unoma
How my world has changed.
When I was young (and even when I was no longer so young) England had a queen, and we used to go hang out on Bar Beach. Like in England, once upon a time, we in Nigeria drove on the left hand side of the road. Egwusi, okra and ogbono were the main soups, all the others were, well, regional. Black soup was Edo, white soup was Igbo, banga was Warri, ewedu was Yoruba and afang was ‘Calabar’, but we didn’t really have widespread knowledge of each other’s soups back then.
We Bendel kids were the most openminded of all, because with so many ethnicities squeezed into our state borders, we lived our diversity out, and consequently, we were known for weird taste in music. We liked genres like hard rock, so, unlike the Lagos lot, we listened to stuff like Queen, among other weird white rock bands like Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd.
Back then life was innocent and orderly, and in those days though we had power cuts, yes, there were not many of them. After working up a sweat playing in the afternoon sun, as children we would (we could!) drink water straight from the garden tap, gulping thirstily until our stomachs swelled and our breath gave out. Even as teenagers, later at secondary school, we didn’t realise that the rock band Queen was named after the sexual orientation of its lead singer Freddie Mercury, who incidentally, was born in Africa, which we also didn’t know then. Hmmm…how my world has changed.
At FGGC Benin City, there were school excursions in our 52-seater school bus, to places as far afield as Bauchi State’s Yankari Game Reserve and Festac ‘77 in Lagos, believe it our not! Our school also took us to see Ipi Tombi live on stage, and we got to meet the performers afterwards as well! Iphi ntombi is Zulu for ‘where are the girls’? Well, we were all there, beautiful young girls from every part of Nigeria. These days it is Bring Back Our Girls. How my world has changed.
At our all-girls boarding school we played traditional British sports like hockey and rounders and even cricket! Like at British schools, we ran a tuck shop, and we also edited and published our own school magazine, titled Coral Beads. The Yoruba word ‘Iyun’ means coral beads, or precious beads, or royal beads interchangeably and inextricably, and to this day they remain an integral part of royal regalia across most of southern Nigeria…like the details on the bronze head of Queen Idia, one of my all-time favourites.
So there we were – under one of Nigeria’s most ancient monarchies, and Oba Akenzua of Benin – a bunch of princesses, in training to become the queens we are today. While our campus was still being constructed, the girls at Idia College had given us a dormitory block and a classroom block of theirs, to house the beginnings of our nascent school, which opened with only First Formers and Lower Sixth Formers. We moved out, and on, two years later.
By the time we next encountered the figure of Queen Idia, it was when her ivory mask became the emblem of Festac ’77 . According to the Tate Gallery, “many see Festac as the turning point in the development of a black global consciousness. It enabled artists to talk about identity, discuss issues of cultural awakening and think about their collective survival.” Of course once again France had to put a fly in the ointment with their usual arrogance and hypocrisy, positioned only for their own colonial control and gain, but that’s a story for another essay. Today we are talking about Queens of the sort that France cannot behead on a whim.
How my world has changed.
1977 was also the silver jubilee of Queen Elisabeth of England, and while I am vehemently antiroyalist, it is only befitting that one pays respect to her today, following her recent transition, exactly one week before International Democracy Day. I have as much sympathy for the late Queen Elisabeth, as I also lack it too. Such lack of sympathy is only to be expected from an African woman, whose father once carried a passport that stated on its front cover “Subject of the British Empire”, and whose people were starved to death and bombarded to smithers during the Biafra War, because Britain was “protecting” “its” “oil interests”. (keep scrolling) >>>>
To quote Frederick Forsythe’s 2020 UK Guardian article
“it would be impossible to scan the centuries of Britain’s history without coming across a few incidents that evoke not pride but shame. But there is one truly disgusting policy practised by our officialdom during the lifetime of anyone over 50, and one word will suffice: Biafra.”
Queen Elisabeth oversaw her Labour government led by PM Harold Wilson, as they facilitated the torture, starvation and genocide of millions of Igbos, too many of them women and children, and all for oil that didn’t even belong to them in the first place.
It is too easy to feel sympathy for a girl, who should never have become queen in the first place, and who, to all intents and purposes walked straight in the belly of the patriarchal beast at 25, an age when most GenZs are still trying to figure out their gender, let alone their identity, or how to conduct a war. Queen Elisabeth did not have the luxury of wondering whether she was a straight queen or a gay queen, or whether she wished to be addressed as ‘she’ or ‘they’, or ‘slay’. Even though we hear she ended up opting for ‘we’. Hmmm…I’m suspecting her o…
Granted, it must have been terrifying for her to have to walk into great halls of surly old men who apparently knew what the heck was going on, and just make an executive decision. However, given that she had the power to dissolve parliament, as well as to appoint ministers, advisers and cabinet officials to the crown, where was the problem with not doing so? Why turn a blind eye to the atrocities being committed by her own governments and in her own name?
Everybody has a price. The Africans who sold their kindred into slavery accepted tobacco, booze, firearms and trinkets, continue to do so to this day, though these days it’s Cuban Habanos, fine liquors, AK47s and DeBeers bling. Well, it seems the Queen priced herself a little higher than even that, and who can blame her. How many of the thieving Nigerian elite would give up their wealth because it is ‘the right thing to do’? So why should we expect Queen Elisabeth to care about a bunch of Black people who sell each other out and mismanage their affairs, when ‘doing the right thing’ would mean that said Black people would get all the lovely loot, rather than she and her cohorts and family? It’s a tough one, huh.
So let me let sleeping queens lie…in their graves…just as they must have lied to themselves on the subject of human rights and wrongs. Let me turn our focus instead, to democracy, a thing the queen supposedly oversaw, and one which she constitutionally ‘gifted’ all her ex-colonies as a matter of default..and continued control.
I once sat at lunch with a Canadian judge and some other Black ladies who like myself, all originally came from Britains ex-colonies. The subject of democracy came up and she proceeded to tell us about the etymology of the word. I had to restrain myself from gaping, when she said it stemmed from ‘demon’ and ‘chaos’. Frankly, while I can kinda-sorta understand why anyone would associate those two words with democracy, the magnitude of her ignorance indicated to me that Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was clearly onto a good thing with his “Demonstration of Crazy” interpretation. How does a whole judge with a smartphone let such rubbish even cross her lips! Google is your friend, sister. What seems to permeate Black society on the subject of democracy is IGNORANCE. So let’s begin with the origin of the word. DEMOS is Greek for people, and KRATIE is Greek for power. Democracy is the power of the people. At least it should be.
But to read the UN Secretary General’s 2022 excruciatingly feeble message for International Democracy Day, 2022 is to understand why the world is in turmoil today. Whom is he telling to “stand up for the democratic principles of equality, inclusion, and solidarity.”? In the very next sentence, he urges whomever to “stand with those who strive to secure the rule of law and promote the full participation in decision-making.”
This is the same week in which I believe I heard Kingpin of colonial stranglehold, HRH Charles III of England say something about “upholding constitutional government and to seek the peace, harmony and prosperity of the peoples of these islands and of the Commonwealth realms and territories throughout the world.”
Which way my people? Demonstration of Craze, or extension of neo-colonialism? I am so happy to hear from the BBC that a nation of whom I am not the greatest of fans myself, namely the Eastern Caribbean state of Antigua and Barbuda, plans to vote on the King’s role as head of state. Kudos Antigua! Look to Mia Mottley, and do the right thing. I fervently hope that the nations of this region will finally now opt for republicanism, and get rid of the face of any British monarch on their currency. There are enough iconic figures in the Caribbean to put on XCD (Eastern Caribbean Dollar) banknotes, but if they insist that they need a queen on them, then I nominate the early 16th century bronze head of Queen Idia, Iyoba of Oba Esigie, that was stolen by the British, and is displayed at the British Museum.
Meanwhile, I remain loyal…one of millions of loyal African Queens. To finally see off the British Empire would make me very happy…but never gay.