Posthumous Letter to Mayor of Juba: In Defence of our Beloved Coffins
Your Worship: The Lord Mayor,
As I write this letter, there is a soldier standing in front of your office. He is knocking at the right door but in the wrong hour! He is a lost or a dead man!
From his apparition appearance, he is an ambassador of about 5,000 South Sudanese that the Red Cross has reported to have disappeared during the War of the Big Seat to date.
He is also representing the half-a-million souls of the post-independence war and about 3 million of the pre-independence war of liberation for our now beloved South Sudan.
In the dawn of the 39th Sunday, in the 9th month and on its 269th day of the 2,021st year of our Lord (Anno Domini), and on the 39th month of the physical disappearance and the spiritual reappearance of my elder brother in Juba, I am forced to bring this to your both moral and mayoral attention.
Your Worship, the Lord Mayor of Juba, before I woke up to go and worship my Lord, Jesus Christ, I am told to deliver this message to His Excellency the President, through your lordship, the mayor.
Yes, I saw this vision in an early morning dream. Since its rhythmic perturbation is disturbing not only my mind but also my soul, and as the soldier that was standing before your office asked me to write it for him to you, here we go…
Of course, daily I do write on my own behalf and on behalf of South Sudanese, both the living dead and the dead living. Therefore, this piece of mine I write for their rest in peace in general and for the peace of this boggling mind of mine in particular.
Dear Lord Mayor, the soldier was/is looking for a coffin! He also wants a cross on his grave, because he is a Christian. You know, all Christians, including those denying Jesus Christ today through such deeds, will have that four-directional wooden or concrete stick forced down the heap of their covering earth, whether they want it or not deep there in their 6-feet dungeon.
Unfortunately, the soldier does not have his among the thousands of the post-independence graves in Juba. I did not bury him because he did not die then, but he is not alive now. I mean I am not enabled to go back to bury any loved one in my country because I am (as believed) that ‘imbecile exile’ in the black book of the ‘Gospel according to NSS’!
All in all, the soldier, who joined the Sudan People’s Liberation Army in 1985 is looking for a coffin. Then? He must be looking for a cemetery as well.
But why is the disappeared soldier kneeling for his own burial box in Your Worship’s office, and not in, OoPS! (Office of President Salva)? It is because of this but innumerable other reasons:
The unburied soldier, whose sold-out soul is loitering solo in the Juba’s city streets and cemeteries, saw you throwing out very beautiful coffins, so he is envying one! The soul had to covet the coffin. His bones need to be covered in that coffin, yes the one you’ve banned and want to burn in case it appears at the roadside again. Sir, there is no universal decency beyond this! I suppose the last right (if any) in our nascent nation’s constitution must be the right to decent burial.
Your Worship and your party; I mean also mine, and my late brother’s, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) — oh yes — wants to keep Juba clean and glean. If coffins are delineated as part of that which litters our brand new country’s city, what about the bones and souls of the unburied ‘cityzens’ of Juba, including the upcoming ones, ha?
In fewer words to the above paragraph, if the mayors and the government hosted by this Great City of the Nile had nibbed insecurity in the bud, including reining in the well-known unknown gunmen, my brother, among thousand others, would not need even a single coffin today. Meaning? The Ugandan and Kenyan coffin suppliers would find their demands elsewhere.
Not only that, sir. If you and your government really wanted to put this rampant death to its permanent dearth, then you know the source. ‘Wasak’ (garbage) is the secret to natural deaths in Juba City as an entity and South Sudan in its entirety. Now, you know why Khartoum does not ‘donate’, say export, coffins to Juba the Kampala and Nairobi way? Juba is busy day in day out exporting her terminally ill citizenry, which in turn is returned in coffins! That is the ugliest face of our independence! Juba in Khartoum with the reverse being true 10 years after!
By the way, ‘cofin ma afin yaki’ (a coffin does not stink), but unclaimed dead bodies in the backyards and mortuaries, thrown-away foetuses from unintended pregnancies by the teenage orphans making a living around the porches of posh city hotels, household refuse, fuel generators’ fumes, construction obstructions, as a few to mention, should make part of your daily demolition; not selectively the rakubas of the miserable widows, widowers and orphans of the SPLM’s uncountable wars of ‘liberty, justice and prosperity’.
Yes, sir, sincerely speaking, you are doing well in your ongoing attempts to ‘liberate’ the lower economy from the hands of foreign scavengers that are outcompeting the named survivors of the said wars, but why are you demolishing their only lives left on earth, the kiosks where they vendor their cooking oil, flour and bambe…? That is why I believe my brother who is still hovering over your city will always come and camp at your office door, demanding a rakuba for his widow and orphans from whom he was mysteriously ‘snatched away’ in his house at Mia Saba late in the 9th night of December 2018.
His name is job. He suffered all those Biblical series of serious agonies that Job, his namesake, passed through. Still, I don’t believe Job’s wrongly peddled adage applies on this SPLA’s freedom fighter, a gallant and faithful first lieutenant: “The Lord gives, the Lord takes!” (Job 1:21). But which Lord in this case now? You, the Lord Mayor, His Excellency the President, or His Almighty, the Lord God…! Or even the other Jebel Kunjur’s lords that you exorcised in the city-liberating exercise the other day? By the way, kudos to you on that line against the innocent citizens’ deceiving witchdoctors.
Nevertheless, there was need for your moderation on the case and for the sake of the city sex workers. Hell no! Even Hell knows they are not ‘Wewe’ prostitutes (from East Africa only) as such. Be careful, man, my niece (and why not even your yours?) could be there! Otherwise what other opportunities is your government creating for such youths? What when all the city water truck drivers are from Eritrea or Ethiopia, the gold miners from Somalia, name them…? This is why my brother and his comrades would not at least leave the nation at ease, sir.
Mr. City Mayor, I can write on and on, words without end, worlds without end, on their behalf, but here is the end. For you to comfortably and successfully remove the coffins from culturally embarrassing and psychologically harassing our people, just do this thing once and for more… Keep Juba clean and secure! And the operation must not be as cantankerous as we are now watching.
In the nutshell, to put the coffin-inviting death to its binding dearth, keep the Juba City, as the seat of the Government, and the country that is the house of the 12 million, professionally clean and equitably secure!
SOURCE: This letter has qualified to be one of the 21 letters from Jon Pen’s diary entitled: ‘POSTHUMOUS EPISTLES: Letters Over My Dead Buddy’.
DISCLAIMER: The writer is the Executive Director of Faithbook Mission, but the opinions expressed in this and his daily writing, unless attributed, do not necessarily reflect the policies of the Mission.
