By Ivan Grozny
Your Excellency Emperor of Bugunda and Sovereign of the Earth,
1. My name is Ivan IV Vasilyevich. When I was on your side of life, I ruled as the Grand Prince of Moscow from 1533 to 1547 and ‘Tsar of All the Russias’ from 1547 until I left your mortal coil for Hereafter in 1584. As an Earthling, my enemies labeled me “Ivan the Terrible” to spite me. But here in Hereafter, we bear no grudge against anyone, so I go by that spiteful appellation, joyfully across this realm.
2. Of late I have been besieged by many of your countrymen and women here. They insist I contact you on a number of issues agitating their minds. They claimed I, being a white man and a king while on Earth, is best placed to deliver their inter-galactic requests and advice to Your Excellency.
3. They insist that even if the ultra-pious Saints-Triumphant here send you a message, it might come to naught.
4. Those from regions other than yours also say their words would count for nothing before you and your courtiers, hence the appeal to me to carry their message to Your Excellency.
5. The pressure became unbearable and I caved in today.
6. This is the first petition they asked me to deliver to your Excellency. Many more are on the way, Your Excellency, and I hope you don’t mind.
7. Apparently impressed with your fair appointments since you took office, a group of them from a town they call Ijebu Igbo in a certain geographical location they named Ogun State are currently on their kneels here begging you to please appoint an Emir to lord it over their descendants in that town.
8. They say you might not have heard about such a “bush” town before now but that it would do fine to rejig your memory if I write in this correspondence that Ijebu Igbo is the home town of one of their prominent indigenes here, a certain Chief Abraham Adesanya, a wiry legalistic fellow who they say once led an important (I suspect irascible, pain-in-the-arse) group called Afenifere as an earthling.
9. They say Ijebu Igbo has been without a monarch since their last Oba, who is on my right hand peering over my paper as I write this, came over here about 20 years ago.
10. They say that a case instituted over the throne of Ijebu Igbo is struck somewhere or in something called the Judiciary. Some swore the case file is somewhere in a cobweb-clad cabinet at your Supreme Court.
11. (My aside: Really, you have a Supreme Court? I thought the Supreme Court is only found here in the Hereafter? Pardon my ignorance, Your Excellency!)
12. They say the contraption called the Judiciary is the headache of everyone on Earth now, including Your Excellency. (My aside: Sir, Can’t you just simply end this headache by abolishing the Judiciary and shipping everyone connected with it to Siberia in my former domain? What has the Earth turned into? I never had such irritants as Grand Prince of Moscow and Tsar of All the Russias!)
13. Now they beseech you to appoint, instead of the usual Oba, an Emir as Lord and Sovereign of Ijebu Igbo since the courts and gladiators over the throne are apparently unable to come to agreement over the matter.
14. They acknowledge that it will actually be an unprecedented appointment but they trust you to do a great job of it going by your related acts in office. They also assure me that the Ijebu Igbo People are so liberal and progressive that the whole town will start the coronation process with weeks of parties after your announcement, which would go on and on for weeks after the ceremony proper.
15. These people say they had their “light bulb” moment for this wonderful idea following the recent ascension of a young damsel who either found or led a group of women (certainty here is lost in translation from their Yoruba tongue to my native Russian, a laborious process being conducted by someone they say was the first professor of my mother tongue from their tribe) to chase out a certain slave-usurper from a throne whose only legitimate occupants should be a free-born from the upper part of town.
16. According to them, they decided to turn the great task to you following the trouble started here by the Comrade-Father of that young man when he heard that someone on Earth has turned over a shipyard business to his son to manage when he was sure that he, being from a desert countryside, has no knowledge of ships and shipping business!
17. This vexed Comrade-Father, they say, is also unhappy – a very rare state of mind in the Hereafter – over the general conduct of his son on Earth since he transited here. According to what they tell me, the unhappy father says his son now lives by the principles he abhorred while on Earth like brazen nepotism, crass opportunism, barefaced orchestration and manipulation of mass tragedy visited on helpless people, including young girls robbed of their freedom and innocence via forced abduction by some loonies engaged in delusionary warfare with another abhorrent set Comrade-Father calls “the Bourgeois”.
18. They insist that this Comrade-Father takes it as sacrilege that his own son with barely a year of working experience of his 25 years on Earth could plum such low depth – after the straight path he charted for him to follow – without scruples, compromising and commercialising his hard-earned comrade name, spending foreign currencies and hobnobbing with the very class of people he detested and fought against all his earthly life! They say Comrade-Father is also very alarmed by the whispers here and there that his son is riding high on the size, strength and durability of his humongous phallus in a promiscuous use of concubines and brides, and not on Comrade-Father’s good genes deposited in him from birth!
19. Of their choice of who this Emir of Ijebu Igbo should be, they pray Your Excellency not to look beyond your homestead. Many of them here are especially fond of your handsome son who they say just graduated from a foreign university, to be the new Emir of Ijebu Igbo.
20. But the womenfolk are also vociferous in support of your beautiful daughter for her dexterity in something they say is called “social media” on Earth today, especially the one they call twitter where any thought beyond 140 characters is a taboo. The assure Your Excellency that the Ijebu Igbo people are so urbane that they would celebrate the Olympian first of having a female Emir in the whole of earthly history!
21. They beg Your Excellency to please expedite action on this request before the next Ileya Festival, as their descendants say they are tired of doing the 15-minute commute to Ijebu Ode on the third day of Eid to pay homage to the Awujale for nearly two decades now since they last had an Orimolusi.
22. Thank you, Your Excellency Emperor of Bugunda and Sovereign of the Earth, for acceding to this unusual request from these troublesome ex-earthlings from the Land of the Hereafter. Long may you reign sovereign on the exalted throne of your Ancestors!
Ivan Grozny, former Grand Prince of Moscow and Tsar of All the Russias, wrote in from the Land of the Hereafter.
Leave a Reply