The colonial King of Ankole, Omugabe, loved his impala. The capital of Uganda, Kampala, had been named for the graceful antelopes-but the growing population in the city began to squeeze the impala out of their habitat, and they were being hunted relentlessly. The king knew he had to protect the impala he so dearly loved. So, he gathered them ( Read more... )

I know it seems counter-intuitive to put a disco on the first floor of a hotel, but someone in Kyotera apparently thought it was an excellent idea. I have a corner room, and one of my windows opens on the same side of the hotel as the disco, three floors and a thousand thumping beats below me. There’s little sleep tonight-at least not until the ( Read more... )

One of the best ways to see how the locals live, I’ve found, is to visit the market. Alas, on such a trip, words fail me-mostly because I don’t always know what I’m looking at and a language barrier prevents a lot of question-asking. So I’ll let some pictures do the talking this time:

Read on, Macduff, at Scholars & Rogues.

She’s not Big Brother, but Deb Naybor has nonetheless been watching them: twenty-seven women from the village of Nakagongo, Uganda, who have carried with them GPS units that track their movements and Deb, back near Buffalo, New York, has followed them via satellite. Now she’s showing up in Nakagongo to find out just where these women have been ( Read more... )

Our van stops a few yards outside the gate, and our driver, Herman, tells us it’s okay to get out. In front of us, a hundred schoolchildren have gathered to greet us. They sing and jump and clap in rhythm. At the lead are two teenage girls with shaved heads and with lions’ manes tied to their waists. A twelve-year-old boy soon joins them. With ( Read more... )

The road to Bethlehem runs through jungles and slums and Seussian forests, past packed-mud houses and tethered goats, from Uganda’s capital of Kampala through hilly countryside, 90 miles southwest, to Kyotera. There, at an intersection crowded with vendors tending small cookfires and grills, where the roadsides are choked with motorcycles, a dirt ( Read more... )

I wake up to the indistinct sounds of people chattering and a continent’s worth of bird chirping, or so it seems. I hear someone’s rooster crow every once in a while off in the distance, but it’s 9 a.m., so he’s probably been at work for a while now and I’ve been ignoring him all this time. After flying halfway around the world on about three and a ( Read more... )

In the morning, I leave for Africa.

Specifically, I’m heading to Uganda for twelve days, for reasons that still remain vague to me beyond “I’m going to write about being in Africa.” That's all the reason I really need, though: Africa has been a bucket-lister for me for as long as I can remember. ( Read on, Macduff.... )

Most people don’t realize that George Washington, “Father of Our Country,” was a devoté of architecture and interior design. We tend to think of him crossing the Delaware, not dressing windows. “How extremely important this was to him, the extent of his esthetic sense, few people ever realized,” historian David McCullough has noted. “Only a year ( Read more... )

One of the things I’ve found most remarkable about the Civil War is the physical change that overcame President Lincoln during his time in office. The distinguished, thoughtful lawyer from Illinois who first arrived in Washington wasted away over four years; by 1865, he was virtually a smiling skeleton with a mop of bedhead hair ( Read more... )