If the world learned anything from the pathetic spectacle of the Queen’s jubilee last summer, it’s that there is no longer room in this world for kings and queens. Of the twenty-eight or so remaining sovereigns, half of them are officially nothing more than zoo animals. The rest are varying examples of rapacious crooks whose heads are so devoid of intellect and so incapable of good judgment that we might as well chop off every last one of them at the guillotine, which would be the most reasonable thing to do with the lot, if only just to prove how entirely undeserving, superfluous, and completely unnecessary these figureheads truly are. If the bourgeoisie wants a justification for all this blood (after all there is some wealth involved here) then, hell… let’s just call this an experiment in political science. Any self-respecting academic Center for Democracy should be willing to donate some funding for such important research. We ourselves, as the scientific editors of Selecting Stones, would be more than happy to help champion the cause of Queen Elizabeth’s final jubilee.
Mswati III of Swaziland
But Swaziland in particular is perhaps the most poorly run country on the entire planet, thanks in no small part to recent financial bailouts from the deplorable post-Apartheid government of South Africa, which has inexplicably chosen to allow Swaziland to remain the last absolute monarchy in Africa. To be precise, though, the proud polygamist King Mswati III does still technically share the sovereign power to waste his country’s meager resources on the construction of bigger and better palatial sex dens (this, of course, is the king’s birthright) and lavish European shopping sprees with his aging mother, who may or may not also be a sexual deviant.
Just how stupid is this tyrant of Swaziland, King Mswati III? As many of our readers are undoubtedly aware, Mswati’s kingdom quite famously boasts of the highest HIV infection rates in the world, hence it also holds the title for the world’s lowest life expectancy at a mere 32.5 years. This astonishing passage from Wikipedia proves once again why sometimes babies are in fact much better off in life by being callously murdered in their mother’s wombs before ever getting the overrated chance to see the light of day:
“In an attempt to mitigate the HIV and AIDS pandemic in 2001, the king used his traditional powers to invoke a time-honoured chastity rite (umcwasho), which encouraged all Swazi maidens to abstain from sexual relations for five years. This rite banned sexual relations for Swazis under 18 years of age from 9 September 2001 [to] 19 August 2005, but just two months after imposing the ban, he violated this decree when he married a 17-year-old girl, who became his 13th wife. As per custom, he was fined a cow by members of her regiment, which he duly paid.”
But much to everyone’s surprise, the king’s bold and courageous decision to invoke the time-honored chastity rite of umcwasho quickly proved to be yet another miserable failure on the part of the Swazi leadership, as HIV infection rates in Mswati III’s absolute kingdom only continued to climb even higher during this period of formal royal discouragement against any sexual relations involving Swaziland’s population of middle-aged women (i.e., ages 12 to 17). Having himself enjoyed the good fortune of advancing to the ripe old age of 44 – which he and his thirteen wives smartishly celebrated with a brand new McDonnell Douglas DC-9 twin-engine jet given to them by so-called development partners and friends of the king – perhaps King Mswati III is finally starting to overstay his welcome? (Actually, to be clear, the number of wives who are currently using the king’s new jet has now dwindled to only twelve, since one of his wives, Angela Dlamini, also known as LaGija, decided back in July – and who can blame her? – to run away from the king. She now lives in a house at some holiday resort in South Africa.)
A man has his head stomped into the concrete, most likely for saying something about the king on Twitter
Although the political opposition in this land without political parties has been routinely defanged over the years – we encourage all of our readers to regularly post nasty comments about the decrepit Swazi monarch King Mswati III on Twitter – the writing is very much on the wall for the institution of monarchy in Swaziland. As recently as September 2012, for instance, an attempt by an alleged South African communist to bomb a car that was transporting Mswati III missed only by a few hours. What a shame.
It is our prediction that the monarchy of Swaziland will not be able to survive another umcwasho.
