My arrival in Kampala coincided with the opening of the government’s media centre. As marabou storks wheeled in languid circles in the sky and his soldiers paced outside, President Museveni slouched grim-faced in his chair, showing no sign of the legendary charm as his staff introduced themselves.
Then he began to talk, and an extraordinary thing happened. His eyes boggled, his hands flew, his face came alive. He cracked jokes in Luganda and dropped the odd proverb. Lecturing “my children, my young friends” on the need to develop “ideological understanding”, he talked about how larvae became butterflies, said Africa was undergoing a similar metamorphosis, and cited the 500 years it took Europe to move from feudalism to modernity.
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