The management of U.S. institution Carnegie Mellon University has distanced the institution from the offensive tweets of Uju Anya, a professor in the school’s department of modern languages who described the late Queen Elizabeth II as a “wretched woman” and a “genocidal colonizer.”
Amid palpable trepidation over the ailing Queen’s condition early Thursday — hours before her death was officially announced — Anya in a thread of tweets wished the Queen “an agonizingly painful death like the one she caused for millions of people.”
“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,” Anya tweeted on Thursday.
After many people reported the tweet, Twitter took it down for violating a rule that prohibited “wishing or hoping that someone experiences physical harm.”
But it continued to generate a avalanche of criticisms, including from Carnegie Mellon University, where Anya teaches applied linguistics.
“We do not condone the offensive and objectionable messages posted by Uju Anya today on her personal social media account. Freedom of expression is core to the mission of higher education, however, the views she shared absolutely do not represent the values of the institution, nor the standards of discourse we seek to foster,” Carnegie Mellon University tweeted Thursday.
Anya’s tweets also caught the attention of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
“This is someone supposedly working to make the world better?” Mr Bezos said in a tweet. “I don’t think so. Wow.”
Netizens have since besieged her twitter page, calling for termination of Ms Anya’s appointment, stressing the condemnation would not suffice. They clamoured disciplinary measures must be taken against the professor.
Anya’s attack on Queen Elizabeth was part of her deep seated and often expressed resentment over the Nigerian Civil War (1967-1970). An estimated two million people were believed killed by the Nigerian troops during an attempt by Anya’s Igbo ethnic group to secede from Nigeria barely seven years after independence.
“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,” Anya added on Twitter after being rebuked by Mr Bezos.
The professor, who is of Igbo origin in eastern Nigeria, has gained Twitter notoriety for whipping up ethnic sentiment, especially against the Hausa and Yoruba population.
Discussion about this post