Africa's last absolute monarch, King Mswati III, has urged his subjects to vote in today's general election, saying that it was "high time Swaziland moved forward into the 16th Century". He also promised that anyone who refused to vote, or who spoiled their ballot, would be fed to hyenas. Swazis will be voting Yes for Mswati, or No to representative democracy.

The elections have been widely condemned as a sham as Mswati has outlawed political parties. However the king continues to deny these claims, and this morning his spokesman, Prince Valiant Mswati XI, insisted that the elections would lead to political parties.

"We have political parties," said Prince Valiant. "We have them all the time.

"We dress up as famous politicians, and party like wild beasts.

"And this time will be no different. When the will of the Swazi people is heard, when they demand ten more years of benign smiley semi-nude awesomeness from our King, we will have another political party.

"I can officially state that it is going to be off the hook, because we've just bought another shipment of maidens from their parents in the highlands."

He said the maidens had been a "bargain" as their parents had only asked $5 for each girl after King Mswati had threatened them with hyenas.

However, he confirmed that while political parties were "awesome", other enemies of the monarchy would remain banned. These included pants for women, condoms, rape trials, and photographs of the earth from space.

He said that the space photographs were especially subversive, as they were "a Western conspiracy to undermine the truth that the planet is shaped like King Mswati's royal phallus and is carried through the cosmos on the back of a gigantic honey-badger, dancing and weaving between stars which are the wives of all the past King Mswatis, set on fire and glued to the dark black mud-wall of the universe".

Asked for a comment, the Astronomer Royal of Swaziland said that it was "a little more complex than that", but that basically this was a correct image of the universe.

"It's not really a honey-badger per se," he said. "More of a cosmic badger-cum-meerkat.

"And the wives weren't set on fire. It's more like spontaneous combustion, aided with petrol and matches."

Voting is expected to last into the weekend ? and the first results in favour of Mswati are likely to be released later next week, along with a list of names of those scheduled to be fed to hyenas.

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