Professor Uju Anya doubles down on Queen Elizabeth comments

The Carnegie Mellon professor who sparked a firestorm when she wished Queen Elizabeth II an “excruciating” death has doubled down on her comments, saying she was trying to teach America about the monarchy’s role in an African genocide.

Uju Anya, a Nigerian-American associate professor of second language acquisition at the prestigious Pennsylvania university, sat down for an interview Wednesday on the podcast “This Week in White Supremacy,” where she took a defiant stance, telling the hosts: “I said what I f–king said.”

The controversy around the 46-year-old educator and activist began unfolding last week, when in response to news that doctors were “concerned” about the Queen’s health, she tweeted: “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating.”

Hours later, it was announced that Britain’s longest-serving monarch died at age 96 at Balmoral Castle in Scotland.

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.”

Anya’s employer, Carnegie Mellon University, distanced itself from her comments about the Queen but did not say whether she would be disciplined.

“We do not condone the offensive and objectionable messages posted by Uju Anya today on her personal social media account,” CMU said in a statement.

“Free 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,” the statement added.

Thousands of students and academics expressed support for the educator in a petition circulating this week, and Anya wrote in a tweet on Monday that her job at CMU was not in jeopardy.