JAFFE JOFFER (17 January 1931 - 16 August 2018) His Excellency, Ruler for Life, King Jaffe Joffer, Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Zamunda in Particular
History[]
There are discrepancies regarding when and where Jaffe Joffer was born, but most biographical sources hold that he was born on May 17th, 1928, near Kampala, the capital city of the Central African nation of Zamunda. Furthermore, there is nothing known about his parents except that they were members of the Joffer ethnic group. The Joffer tribe is a Nguni tribe closely related to the Zulus and the Wakandans and was the local ruling people prior to the arrival of the European colonial powers. But by the time of Jaffe's birth, the Joffers were already reduced to only one of many local tribes.
Jaffe Joffer joined an Islamic school in Bombo in 1941. After a few years he left school and did odd jobs before joining the King's African Rifles (KAR) of the British Colonial Army in 1946 as an assistant cook. In the following years, Joffer was deployed in Zamunda, Kenya and Somalia until 1954, when he was made effendi(warrant officer), the highest rank possible for a Black African in the colonial British Army of that time. In the following decade Joffer made a fortune by smuggling ivory from Ivory-Lana as well as gold and arms from the Republic of Zangaro together with the Zamundan Prime Minister, Milton Obote. These secret deals were uncovered in 1965 and one year later the Parliament's demand for an investigation triggered an uprising of forces loyal to Obote led by the newly minted General Jaffe Joffer. Obote and Joffer forced the current king, Mutesa II of Buganda, into exile to the United Kingdom, where he remained until his death in 1969.
After Obote ousted the king and declared himself executive president, Jaffe used his enormous wealth and his Joffer heritage to gather support among the ethnic groups such as the Kakwa, the Lugbara and the Nubians. In 1966 Jaffe married a Joffer woman called Aeoleon, some years after the birth of their son, Akeem Joffer, born April 3, 1967. Eventually, a rift developed between Joffer and Obote, worsened by the support Joffer had built within the army by recruiting from the local peoples, his involvement in operations to support the rebellion in southern Sudan, and an attempt on Obote's life in 1969. Having learned that Obote was planning to arrest him for misappropriating army funds, Joffer seized power in a military coup on 25 January 1971, while Obote was attending a Commonwealth summit meeting in Singapore. Troops loyal to Joffer sealed off Entebbe International Airport, the main artery into Zamunda, and took the capital city Kampala. Although this was a military coup, Joffer had the support of the Zamundan people on his side and reportedly cheering crowds streamed through the streets of Kampala after the uprising. On February 2, 1971, one week after the coup, Joffer declared himself King of Zamunda and founded the Joffer dynasty - from now on his official title was "His Excellency, Ruler for Life, King Jaffe Joffer, Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Zamunda in Particular". The Joffer rule was welcomed both within Zamunda and by the international community.
In the following decades Joffer adapted an absolute ruling style that was frequently compared to the one of the French king Louis XIV. Joffer's extraordinary wealth - that originated from his smuggling time and the Zamundan treasury - allowed him and the other members of the Joffer dynasty to live a life in enormous luxury that could compete with every European monarch in history. But while Joffer was an obscenely wealthy man (widely renown for his distinctive lion fur sash) the Zamundan people were less fortunate as they suffered under famine, poverty and the aftermath of the civil war. Nevertheless, Joffer was a respected and beloved ruler due to the good reputation of the Joffer tribe and out of fear of a potential return of the British colonial forces. The persecution of ethnic groups such as the Zamundan Asians, the remaining Europeans and tribes supporting the old Obote regime made Joffer even more popular among the Zamundan Nguni peoples.
However, the arrangement of ethnic cleansing naturally led to international criticism. Joffer reacted by using his enormous wealth and his natural charisma to gather support not only in Africa but all over the world. Soon, a wide network of alliances became the keystone of Jaffe Joffer's influence and power - besides the gigantic treasury of the Joffers, of course. Joffer's most important supporters and arms suppliers were the Soviet Union and Abdul Fakkadi's totalitarian nation of Carmbombya. Other close allies of Zamunda were East Germany, the secluded nation of Wakanda, Ivory-Lana, Matobo as well as the African communist dictatorships of Nagonia, Gorotoland and the Republic of Zangaro.
In 1988 Jaffe's first-born son, Akeem, fled from Zamunda to New York out of unhappiness with being pampered all his life. There, Akeem denied his royal heritage and worked at a local restaurant called McDowell's - a cheap copy of the McDonald's fast food franchise - while looking for a queen he can both love and respect and who accepts him for his personality, not his status. But soon, his father found out about his son's whereabouts. Traveling to New York himself, Jaffe returned his son to Zamunda where he arranged Akeem's wedding with Lisa McDowell. To prevent Akeem from being expelled from the Joffer dynasty for marrying a commoner, Jaffe depicted the ceremony as a political wedding between the heir of Zamunda and a representative of the USA, thus cementing an alliance between the two countries. With the new bonds between the Joffer dynasty and the American president Samuel Tresch, Zamunda now was in the unique position of being allied with both the USA and the Soviet Union.
This remarkable position during the Cold War turned Zamunda into a place of transshipment where both sides traded. Especially the arms trade flourished and soon Zamunda turned into a paradise for shady arms dealers such as James McCullen Destro XXIV and Yuri Orlov. Thanks to this development Zamundan economy boomed and alongside the further growth of the wealth of the Joffer dynasty, the quality of life in Zamunda increased with the improvement of infrastructure and industry.
With the decline of the Soviet Empire in 1991 the already elderly Jaffe Joffer liberalized his country as a convergence to the West, especially the USA. The ethnic cleansings that were common in early days of Joffer rule ceased to terrorize the minorities and hardliner military personal such as Jaffe's cousin Dibala Joffer were banned from the country. Dibala would hide in the nation of Equatorial Kundu where he supposedly played a part in the two Kundu genocides of 1994 and 2004. After the latter, Dibala seized power over Equatorial Kundu and ruled with an iron fist until his death in an American hospital in 2009.
With the beginning of the 21st century, Jaffe Joffer became sicker and sicker every day until he eventually died in 2018. He was succeeded by his son, Akeem, who would ally Zamunda more closely with the USA and who would rule the nation until its decline, as the second and last of the Joffer dynasty.