My father, also a moderately-traveled businessman, says Queen Elizabeth does not recognize the things Britain did to its colonies as evil. My mother’s anger for Britain is unclear, muddled by her peaceful being and the dream that her children would one day emigrate to the United Kingdom, where things are better. My parents inherited their fractions of these feelings. My paternal grandfather, a moderately-traveled businessman and religious leader recognizes the Queen as the head of a powerful kingdom that grew off the resources of its colonies. These abuses, she heard, happened and hung around almost every month, like the moon’s halo. As a kid, her elders told her stories about Indigenes being beaten or raped by white soldiers. My maternal grandmother knows the Queen as the distant commanding figure of oppressive and racist white soldiers who thought Nigerians to be inferior. When I spoke about the Queen’s legacy in Africa, it came from a place of intellectual effort. I could connect with expressed anger and found the incessant cries of “respect the dead/old” by British Imperialists to be quite annoying, but anger? No.

I am deeply aware of these facts but found it hard to feel anything over the Queen’s death. Her roles are complex, but no matter how much you search, the Queen’s good deeds and perceived “helplessness” do not justify the evils she condoned and benefitted from. As an adult who’s tried to learn about my country’s history, I am deeply aware that Elizabeth was part, if not center, of Britain’s involvement with Nigeria. Much of this history, as I would later learn, is either whitewashed or oversimplified. I knew the Queen through the little national history I was taught in social studies classes as a child. The Queen is dead, so what?ĪN EMOTIONAL DISCONNECT, OR IS THIS GENERATIONAL HEALING? The death of the Queen, for me as a young Nigerian, is met with numbness. We were literate enough to know that these phenomena are cogs in the wheels of larger issues that affect us, but there are more pressing wahalas at hand. It was like coverage of record-breaking heatwaves in the global north or the tension between the United States and China over Taiwan - we did not care that much. To me and my friends - journalists and citizens - Elizabeth’s death was just another trend the media would be shoving down our throats in the coming weeks. Shelve your pitches or schedule it for October ending (skull face emoji).” All of this took place more than an hour before the Queen’s death was officially announced on Twitter. A friend posted “Operation London Bridge to commence. My circle of freelance friends screenshot and reposted this slide. On the next slide, I joked about me and my freelance journalist friends not getting commissions because the Queen’s death would take over the media space for the next couple of weeks. On my WhatsApp status, I joked about taking a moment of silence for the dead Queen, and an hour of silence for history students across universities who will now be studying the Elizabethan era as a part of their curriculum. I took a screenshot of BBC’s black logo and shared it in Journo-Geekology, a Whatsapp group of journalism and media geeks that I belong to. I had the type of elation a journalist gets when they stumble on an unlikely link. About two hours before the news broke, I checked the BBC’s website, and it was black. I came across this information again in an explainer video by Business Insider that trended on Twitter hours before the Queen’s death was announced. Once, as an aspiring journalist, I’d read that if the Queen died, the BBC would turn black from its signature red. Before the announcement of the death of Queen Elizabeth, I, like many journalists, kind of knew.

Queen of the kingdom of the dead