As tributes pour in after the death of Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday, some internet users express dissenting voices, sometimes going so far as to celebrate the death of the sovereign, whom they present as a symbol of Britain’s colonizing past.
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“Lizzy is in a box”, proclaim supporters in a stadium in Dublin (Ireland) in a video that went viral in the space of a few hours on YouTube and Twitter.
On Snapchat, some of their compatriots appear dancing in a nightclub holding messages displaying “Lizzie is deceased”, or even all smiles and thumbs up in front of the announcement of the death of the British sovereign announced on television .
Another sequence showing three Irish dancers in front of Buckingham Palace to the sound of “Another one bites the dust” by the group Queen. The sequence was however filmed in January 2022, but it re-emerged on Twitter on Thursday, where it was “liked” by more than 530,000 people in less than 24 hours.
Behind the hashtags #IrishTwitter, #BlackTwitter and #IndianTwitter, since Thursday there have been various videos, photos and messages in English, but also in Spanish or French, often openly mocking and sometimes very political, which recall that Elizabeth II, during of her 70 years of reign, was also the sovereign of a country that colonized others.
“The colonizing queen passed away today”, proclaims an Internet user in English in a viral video on TikTok. “She has committed too many abuses”, adds another in a message in French “loved” 25,000 times, inviting his subscribers to learn about “the revolt of the Mau Mau”, carried out in the 1950s against the colonial forces forces in Kenya, in which at least 10,000 people, according to the lowest estimates, were killed.
“Today, we mourn all the lives stolen, raped and traumatized, affected and destroyed during the reign of Elizabeth II”, also launches a message relayed in English on Facebook in several groups dedicated to the Australian Aboriginal community.
Uju Anya, a professor at a prestigious American university and born in Nigeria, a former British colony, violently criticized Elizabeth II in tweets, attracting many criticisms.
“If anyone expects me to express anything other than disdain for the sovereign who oversaw a government that fostered a genocide that massacred and displaced half of my family…they can always dream,” she said, alluding to the 1967 civil war (or “Biafra War”), where at least a million people died (mostly from starvation) after an attempted regional secession. The United Kingdom was accused of having contributed to the crisis by supporting the central government.
South Africa’s hard-left Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party issued a widely retweeted statement proclaiming: “We do not mourn the passing of Elizabeth, as for us her death is a reminder of a tragic time for the country. and the history of Africa”.
When Elizabeth was born in 1926, the British Empire spanned six continents. During his reign, which began in 1952, most of the 56 countries that make up the Commonwealth gained their independence, including many nations on the African continent such as Ghana, Kenya or Gambia.