invitation, I thought I should hang around until the opening of the Toro parliament.
I had a few memories of the kingdom from 1966. The main town was Fort Portal, named after an early British surveyor of the protectorate. In 1966 it had a kind of expatriate life. There were tea planters. Unwillingly one day I went fishing with one of them in Lake Albert, to the west, and quickly made a mess of things, fouling up line and fly on an underwater snag and amusing no one. The best known bar was The Gum Pot. The ruler was the Omukama, and his palace was at the top of a hill. There were stories about him (or, possibly, his father). When he had drunk too much his majordomo would keep visitors away, saying, “The Omukama is tired.” One year, in a decorating mood, he laid a coat of green paint on the stones beside the hill road to the palace.
The days passed. No word came from James about the arrangements that had been made for us. Patrick, with his ideas of diplomatic etiquette, didn’t press. On the Saturday when the boy-king was to open the parliament Patrick telephoned James in the morning, and we were told that there were many guests and we couldn’t be fitted in. The ceremonial weekend passed. James said, “You know these royal people. They don’t care.”
On the days that followed—perhaps Patrick had delivered a diplomatic rebuke—James became more and more agitated. We had been let down; he felt responsible and very much wanted to make it up to us. He wanted us to go to Toro. He even wanted us to spend the night there. He became quite frantic. He said he had planned everything, and he was so full of remorse for his royals we thought it would be churlish, for his sake, not to go to Toro.
At the last minute, however, some good fairy made us decide not to spend the night there, but to drive back to Kampala. Patrick, always correct, put on a formal grey suit for what could be thought of as his visit to royalty; and we went in his ambassador’s car, with his Trinidad standard unfurled.
It was a four-hour drive to Fort Portal. At least half of that was on the straight royal roads of Buganda which, when they went up a hill, seemed to disappear into the sky at the top of the hill. But these Buganda roads were in a poor way, in spite of the editorial in the paper that morning which said that the people of Uganda were “hood-winked” into believing that the roads were not good; and speed-breakers across the road in every peopled area shook up the bones.
We came in time to the British-built roads of Toro: not straight, always curving, laid down in cuttings in the red soil which often shut out the view. But for some reason—perhaps the population was sparser and there was less heavy traffic—these roads were in much better shape than the Buganda ones; and we were able to travel at speed. The stone markers on the roadside were engraved every four kilometres with the distance to Fort Portal. That distance seemed to melt away, and the landscape all around was wonderful: parkland between mountain ranges.
James, on the telephone from Kampala, guided us through the small town. We came to the hill with the palace. As we climbed I looked for the roadside stones that might have been painted green by an eccentric omukama before 1966. I couldn’t see them. The stones might have been removed as being too disfigured, or the story might have been false. On every side the view was grand: we looked down to wide parkland, pale grass, darker trees, and the roofs of the small colonial town of Fort Portal.
The hill was isolated; every view was grand. It occurred to me that this hill would always have been the seat of a king or chief; it would have had a history. If Africans hadn’t built with the perishable products of the forest, it would have been worth excavating.
We came to a gravel area between the palace and a small, featureless modern building. When we got out of the car we were welcomed by a small team of smiling, busy men who darted about and took photographs of us and managed to make a lot of noise. They must have been the palace officials James had talked about. So, reassuringly, James had kept his