Anya told the podcast hosts that her tweet wishing the dying Queen “suffering” was borne out of her family’s traumatic experiences during Nigeria’s civil war.
Anya’s tweet was later removed for violating the social media platform’s rules, but she followed up with another one, writing: “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.”
During her podcast interview on Wednesday, Anya said she did not regret her tweet, saying that it was borne out of her family’s difficult experience in Nigeria during the country’s civil war.
In 1967 — seven years after Nigeria won independence for the UK — and 15 years into Queen Elizabeth’s reign — a conflict broke out between the Nigerian government and the Biafra separatists who fought for autonomy for the Igbo people, an ethnic minority facing persecution in parts of the country.
Britain, seeking to maintain control of oil production in the region, sided with the Nigerian government and sent vast amounts of arms to be used against the rebels.
Two years into the struggle, some two million Nigerians were dead, many of them from starvation, including children.
Anya’s mother, who at the time had two young children and was pregnant with a third, fled the war zone with her in-laws as Nigerian soldiers were destroying villages.
Anya, who was born six years after the war, said she blamed the Queen for the slaughter of her people.
“I had an emotional reaction and an emotional outburst,” she told the podcast hosts. “I was triggered by this news. It went deep into pain and trauma for me due to my family experience with the rule of this monarch.”
Anya claimed her tweet was “not planned. It was very spontaneous,” and ultimately its aim was to educate her followers.
Before being deleted by Twitter, the professor’s missive drew the ire of numerous users, among them Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who wrote: “This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don’t think so. Wow.”
Anya clapped back at the billionaire, writing, “May everyone you and your merciless greed have harmed in this world remember you as fondly as I remember my colonizers.”
She addressed her online feud with the businessman on Wednesday, wondering aloud why he chose to rebuke her, even though she was not the only person expressing a critical opinion of the Queen.
“The Irish were Riverdancing across the Internet, literally half the planet was overjoyed, so I was wondering, why me? I never wished her death. She was already on that path,” Anya said. “I never said that anyone should kill her. All I said was: may she suffer the way millions of people have suffered at her hand.
“That is what I said, and Bezos and his dusty a– comes at me and literally puts a target on my back. He didn’t criticized my words. he criticized me.”