Blood-brother and king-maker

At a garden party in Kampala, Uganda, in 1994 I overheard Tom Stacey, a tall elegant figure, saying with some urgency, ‘The Bakonjo when I first met them 40 years ago in the west of your beautiful country …’ and later noted, ‘Tom is fascinating for quite a long time about Rwenzori, their king Charles Wesley, who must be made to come back from America, 14 of his people killed yesterday, how he loves the people; but then he goes on for longer than that.’ And finally in an impromptu after-dinner speech he moved from ‘the worst prime minister of the century with the best intentions [Blair] who was dismembering the United Kingdom’ back to the Bakonjo of Rwenzori, ‘who are all the better Ugandans because of their knowledge of who they are’, which I found ‘impressively fluent, spoken with passion and rather moving’. And there you have most of these 500 pages.