28th July, 2019
By Ademola Adegbamigbe
Before “Great”- as if by a universal decision- was dropped as a prefix of “Great Britain,” that country carried its nose in the air all over the place like a supercilious camel. It strutted with the aplomb of a peacock, believing in its invincibility in the comity of nations. This was depicted in, Invasion 1897, a 2014 Nigerian movie produced and directed by Lancelot Oduwa Imasuen, which re-enacted the historical overthrow of Oba Ovonramwen Nogbaisi.
Trouble started when two men among the British-led party under Acting Consul General James Philips were ambushed and killed by some Benin soldiers. To punish the “natives”, the Benin Expedition of 1897 was raised under Admiral Sir Harry Rawson. It was a battle that gave no quarter! They ravaged the kingdom and sent the Oba to exile. After the conquest, the British soldiers sang with gusto:
Rule, Britannia! Britannia, rule the waves!
Britons never, never, never shall be slaves.
Apart from this song, Britain was regarded as “The Empire on which the sun never sets”. This is because the British Empire was so vast that at any one time there was daylight in one of the territories like New England (now, the United States), India, Australia, Nigeria, Ghana, Canada, Papua New Guinea and others…That was what gave the cigar-smoking, face contorting but charismatic Prime Minister of Britain, Winston Churchill, to say in 1942, : “We mean to hold our own. I have not become the king’s first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”
At a point, the Roman empire carried itself with such arrogance before it started suffering disintegration from its Byzantine end. Rome regarded countries around it as nose-picking and anus- scratching primitive people. Thus, it waved off nations like the Huns, Franks, Vandals, Saxons, and Visigoths (Goths), Germania, Britannia, Gaul, Spanniads, Phoenicians, North Africans as Barbarians. As recorded in penfield.edu: “The fall of Rome is an example of the domino effect. The domino effect comes from the idea of placing dominoes on their sides, one next to another, and then intentionally knocking the first one in the line over into its neighboring domino. This creates a chain reaction and all of the dominoes fall down, one after another. For the fall of Rome, it was the Huns invading from the east that caused the domino effect, they invaded (pushed into) the Goths, who then invaded (pushed into) the Roman Empire.”
Like the invasion of Rome by the Barbarians, something is happening in Britain. A Nigerian commentator put it this way: “Rule Britannia! The sun never set on the British empire. The chickens have come home to roost! Is this what Trump is trying to preempt? I’ m afraid it is too late – with almost a century of bloody interference in other countries internal affairs.” Beyond the liquidation of the empire by way of independence to the colonial territories in the past, there is a revolution happening inside the belly of the empire right now. The country is run by immigrants who are in charge of four most strategic offices of government: Prime Minister, Boris Johnson is the grandson of Osman Ali Kemal (Turkish); First Minister and Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab is the son of Peter Raab (Czech Jewish); Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid is the son of Abdul Ghani-Javid (Pakistani); and Home Secretary, Priti Patel is the daughter of Sushil Patel (Indian).
First, Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the grandson of Osman Ali Kemal, Ottoman Turkish, (1867 – 6 November 1922). He was a journalist, newspaper editor, poet and a politician of liberal signature, who, according to some historians, was for some three months Minister of the Interior in the government of Damat Ferid Pasha, the Grand Vizier of the Ottoman Empire.
Kemal’s father, Haci Ahmet Riza Efendi, was, as historians were quoted in Wikipedia, an Ottoman Turk from the village of Kalfat in Çankiri, whilst his mother was a Circassian, reputedly of slave origin. Kemal was a journalist who traveled widely and took his holidays in other countries. On one of several visits to Switzerland, he met and fell in love with an Anglo-Swiss girl, Winifred Brun, the daughter of Frank Brun by his marriage to Margaret Johnson. They were married in Paddington, London, Middlesex, on 11 September 1903.
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