It is a terrible thing when people go out of their way to create what I call unnecessary enemies—people who had no beef with them or bad intent but have been publicly attacked, maligned, insulted, and racially abused. Such is the case now between the United Kingdom and millions of Africans with a long-standing relationship with the UK. It took one visit to Africa for years of simmering tension to erupt between Nigerians at home and abroad who have felt slighted and belittled by the British.
Nigerians have been labeled scammers, drug traffickers, corrupt, aggressive, and worse by the British for years. These people, who came to the area in West Africa uninvited, and called it Nigeria—a name that, for I for one, think should have been changed years ago. Its Latin meaning was created to inform the world that it is a Black area, a Black man’s land, the Latin for black being ‘Niger,’ which Lord Lugard, the creator of Nigeria, thought amusing. The British exploited, pillaged, destroyed, and subdued Nigeria into servitude, never being true friends to Nigerians. Anyone who had doubts about this now have no doubts whatsoever, following the visit of two members of the Windsor family—two members so unpopular and hated by the British media that any association with them gets you nothing but insults.
The British media is under the impression that Nigeria is still a colony, and as its colony, they feel free to say anything they want about the Republic of Nigeria whenever they please. Video after video of low-life racists making negative comments are all over social media, people who have an agenda that has not been well thought out and the ramifications of their words not calculated into what would be the result when uttered and broadcasted to the world.
I am of the age where I was born when Nigeria was still a colony, and growing up in the sixties and seventies, there was still a large British population in Nigeria. One summer holiday home from Eton College during the seventies , I went to the Ikoyi Club in Lagos, which at that time was 98 percent White British but I was a member, jumped into the swimming pool, and was told by a British man wearing colonial shorts to get my Black ass out of their pool. I was seventeen, a student at the most prestigious school in England, being told in my own country to get out of swimming pool by a white man in a country of millions of black people , after all the crap I had endured in England, to get out of a pool one mile away from where my father lived. The Nigerian staff looked at me, looked at the man, and knew there was going to be trouble, and you know what? There was trouble, big trouble, at that pool that day.
One day my parents were asking us children where my youngest brother was as no one could find him. The servants said he had ridden his bike to this same Ikoyi Club, and when they went to find him, the staff said that the President of the club had had my eleven-year-old brother arrested and thrown into jail for fighting white children at the club. What made this scandalous was that this Club President was a Nigerian Brigadier married to a white woman, placed as the President as a token to protect them from outside interference. My father went berserk. This man, the sell-out Nigerian, was summoned by the Military Head of State to get a dressing down like no other dressing down he had ever received and ordered to resign his position at that club immediately.
What I am saying here is that I have not only seen British rubbish in England in the sixties and seventies but also on African soil. Now, in 2024, I see and hear it loud and clear, and every dark memory comes rushing back like a nightmare. It has to end before I leave this earth. I cannot die with these people still running their mouths off to us Nigerians like they did during colonial times.
