Who is Prof Anya, the Lady who Soiled Nigeria’s Image by Wishing Queen Elizabeth II Excruciating Death? By Abdulsalam Mahmud
POLITICS DIGEST- Nigeria’s image has for years been something to worry about in the eye of the international community. And this is for many a wrong reason. But if it becomes terribly sullied now, then it is because of the unbecoming conduct of one of her ‘illustrious’ citizens residing in far-away United States. Her name: Prof. Uju Anya.
A literary ‘amazon’, Prof. Anya teaches and conducts research in the Modern Languages Department at Carnegie Mellon University, as an associate professor of second language acquisition.
Her primary fields of inquiry are critical applied linguistics, critical sociolinguistics, and critical discourse studies examining race, gender, sexual, and social class identities in new language learning through the experiences of African American students.
She has expertise in diversity, equity, and inclusion in instructional practices and curriculum design, applied linguistics as a practice of social justice, intercultural communication, as well as service-learning and civic engagement in secondary and university-level language programs.
Her book ‘Racialized identities in second language learning: Speaking blackness in Brazil’ (Routledge 2017) won the 2019 American Association for Applied Linguistics First Book Award, recognising a scholar whose first book represents outstanding work that makes an exceptional contribution to the field.
The book is the first single-authored volume of sociolinguistic analysis and critical examination of the African American experience in language learning. It examines how students shape and negotiate different identities in multilingual contexts, and it proposes how a multilingual approach (e.g. translanguaging, plurilingual practice) can be utilised for effective language pedagogy.
Her second book, a co-edited volume titled ‘Racial equity on college campuses: Connecting research to practice’, was released by SUNY Press at the end of 2021.
She was an assistant professor of second language learning in Curriculum and Instruction at Penn State University, assistant professor of teacher education in TESOL at the University of Southern California; visiting assistant professor and faculty director of the Dartmouth College Portuguese language study abroad program in Salvador-Bahia, Brazil; and lecturer in applied linguistics, TESOL, Portuguese, and Spanish at UCLA and Dartmouth College.
She holds a PhD in applied linguistics from UCLA, an MA in Brazilian studies from Brown University, and a BA in Romance languages from Dartmouth College.
But despite her enviable professional accomplishments, her emotional stability has to be questioned now with what she put up on social media on Thursday.
Prof. Anya not only ‘massacred’ her own personal character, but smeared the image of Nigeria – Africa’s Giant – when she, wished the just-departed Queen Elizabeth II an ‘agonising death’.
Elizabeth II, the longest-serving British monarch, on Thursday afternoon, was said to be in critical medical condition, according to reports from Buckingham Palace.
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But while the whole world prayed for Her Majesty’s quick recovery, Prof. Anya had another thought. She did what only a ‘lucipher’ perhaps could contemplate: wish The Queen an ‘Excruciating Death’.
In a tweet, Anya callously and ‘satanically’ described Queen Elizabeth as a “wretched woman” and a “genocidal coloniser” who is “the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire,” adding, “May her pain be excruciating.”
“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,” she tweeted. But hours later, the timid Anya quickly deleted the tweet after a series of backlash.
Her cold-hearted wish, however was one that was bound to draw the ire of many, across the globe. And within a short time, persons who couldn’t stomach Anya’s ‘vile conduct’ began throwing flaks at the Nigerian, but US-based don.
Jeff Bezos, prominent world’s billionaire, slammed Anya, for her tweet on The Queen.
The Amazon founder quoted Anya’s tweet and said, “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better?”
“I don’t think so,” Bezos added.
Shamelessly, Anya, a Carnegie Mellon professor, defended her tweet and responded to Bezos, saying: “May everyone you and your merciless greed have harmed in this world remember you as fondly as I remember my colonisers.”
At a time Nigeria joined the international community to mourn Her Majesty, it was utterly heart-wrenching to learn that one of her citizens would have committed an act that appeared clearly sacrilegious, and completely obnoxious.
Anya’s unfortunate ‘Death Wish’ for Elizabeth, surely will make many across the world to start having negative impressions about the presence of mind Nigerians have, while also questioning their stellar behavioural and pristine moral characters.
There is every reason to believe that Prof. Anya’s statement is one that is laced with symptoms of Biafran extremism. What ‘personalities’ like her represents is anything, but role models for young Nigerian girls.
Her comments and nasty conduct smack of Biafran toxicity, intolerance and murderous tendencies. No one will be surprised if she is one of the intellectual backbones of the raw madness the Independent People of Biafra (IPOB) founder, Nnamdi Kanu, put up on radio and on social media long before he was rightly captured by the Nigerian state.
Citizens like her are not the type Nigeria should be proud of, regardless of her literary feats and ‘rich’ academic pedigree. Anya, many will not mind saying, is a ‘disgrace to the Nigerian womenfolk and humanity, in general’.
The United States is the United Kingdom’s number one ally. It will be commendable to see the government immediately press legal charges against Anya (for her evil wish on The Queen), over there in America. If for nothing, to serve as deterrence to other ‘morally-decadent’ foreigners who may wish to drag America’s image in the mud.
Nigerians, on their part, can take solace in the reality that Anya is not, and can never be in the league of some shiny lights and sensational women breaking glass ceilings in various human fields overseas – for Africa’s largest economy.
As such, they should pay only a scant regard to the embarrassing theatrics of Anya, as they join the world in celebrating the iconic Queen Elizabeth II, one British monarch that, even in her death, will continue to be revered and adored by many for generations to come.
