Take me to Rwenzori

William Stanley, the great grandson of explorer Henry Morton Stanley, recently trekked to the top of Mt. Stanley and proposed to his girlfriend. Rodney Muhumuza met the duo...

Between 1887 and 1888, the British-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley embarked on his last expedition to relieve Emin Pasha, the Equatorial Province governor who had been cut off by the Mahdist revolt in Sudan. As head of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, a mission funded essentially by the Royal Geographical Society, Stanley (born John Rowlands in 1841) found himself traversing previously uncharted terrain in the Ituri rain forest. Stanley, according to the BBC history archives, "found" the Rwenzori range, effectively becoming the first European to reach (and map) the area. Also known in the Congo as Bula Matari (Breaker of Rocks), Stanley returned to Europe with the credentials of a hero, a former journalist who had conquered barriers and demystified Africa.

On February 3, over a century since the death in 1904 of the legendary explorer, another Stanley was here to acquaint himself with his great grandfather's conquests. But William Stanley did not come to navigate lakes or to break rocks. He was a man on a different mission; a man in love. Along with his fiancée, Stanley took to the Rwenzoris and there, he trekked to the top of Mountain Stanley, the highest of the three that make up the Rwenzoris. And once he was there, the young man accomplished what had been on his mind since he took the flight from London to Entebbe: he proposed to his girlfriend Rebecca Unwin and she accepted to marry him.

At the Speke Hotel veranda, where I found the two lovebirds relaxing, Stanley was helping himself to some beer and Rebecca, who had never been to Africa before, was chatting with a local travel agent. As love birds, it must be said, they never gave away too much save for occasional glances in each other's eyes. There had to be a tip, and it came from a colleague seated nearby who motioned to me, "That's the 'Speke' guy, and that's his fiancée."

I had been misinformed that a direct descendant of John Hanning Speke, another of the great European explorers, was in town and would be leaving soon. The young 'Speke', I had been told, was tracing his ancestor's footsteps in the countryside. "So you are the new Speke, a great grandson of John Speke," I offered when we met. Stanley was mortified - judging by his slight grin, and told me plainly, "That's very wrong. I am the great grandson of Henry Morton Stanley."

Stanley IV, as I would have liked to refer to him, spoke with the confidence of a media savvy executive and rarely joked. He, however, struggled to get certain things right. When I asked him about some of the sites he had been to in Uganda, he told me that Kigali National Park was one of them and we had to be sorted out by a third party seated nearby. 'Kigali', it turned out, was his pronunciation of Kibaale. "I came specifically to climb the Rwenzori Mountains, to climb Mountain Stanley," he said. "I love the vegetation, it's amazing to see. There is so much in Uganda that a lot of people don't know about."

But he dismissed any suggestion that his adventurous ways were so much because he wanted to emulate his illustrious ancestor. "I have climbed Moutain Kilimanjaro as well but the Rwenzoris are more challenging," he said. But, he admitted, he found some inspiration from being the great explorer's direct descendant.

"I proposed to her on top of Mt Stanley; we are now engaged," he said excitedly, making no secret of admiration for 'Stanley I'. His expedition to Uganda, which lasted well over a fortnight, saw him visit a handful of protected areas from Kibaale National Park to the Rwenzori Mountain National Park to Lake Mburo National Park. He loved what he saw, as he did, seven years ago when he first visited Uganda. "A lot has changed," he said. "The place is beautiful. But I have been to other parts of Africa and there is more wildlife there. More people go to Kenya or Tanzania."

His father, Stanley said, had also been around Africa and was keeping the family's adventurous trait alive; he has climbed mountains in South America and visited sites in South Africa. He is the only one of three siblings who has been to Africa, and described himself as "adventurous".
While the man from the south west of England does not regard highly Uganda's tourism potential beyond making the Rwenzoris a love zone, he rates the local folks handsomely.
"Ugandans are more friendly, in comparison with the Kenyans or the Tanzanians, because they are not after the money," he said. "I am not complaining." Rebecca agreed without saying it. She came across as a taciturn person, and Stanley must have had that in mind when he allowed me "only two minutes" to put my case to her.

A presidential debate?

At the Sheraton's Rwenzori Ballroom on Wednesday evening, there was a wave of expectation among guests as independent presidential candidate Abed Bwanika and Uganda Peoples Congress leader Miria Obote walked in a few minutes past 8 p.m. If Bwanika was scared about his next challenge, it did not show in his bright eyes. And whether or not Miria's grin was a reflection of her confidence is a debatable affair. In the end there were only two real presidential candidates out of a possible 5: President Yoweri Museveni snubbed the event, and his main challenger, FDC's Kizza Besigye, asked to be represented by his envoy, Beti Kamya. And septuagenarian DP leader Ssebaana Kizito was absent with apology. But the evening's moderator, Mr Gawaya Tegulle, was still not reluctant to call it the first presidential debate in the history of Uganda and East Africa. Miria soon found out that she would answer the maiden question of the evening, and that it would be about how her government would tackle the employment and poverty problems in the country. "I have been around the country and seen poverty...One of the reasons is that the present government destroyed agriculture," she claimed as she decried the collapse of the cooperative movement in Uganda. Often referring to "those days" when the arrangement was "employing a lot of people", Milton Obote's widow said: "Without the cooperative movement, the farmers have nowhere to sell their goods at reasonable prices; they are still at the mercy of middlemen." Bwanika then got his chance to rebut Miria's proposals, and he wasted no time explaining how Museveni's government was losing it on corruption, unbalanced trade, and unnecessary wars in the Great Lakes region. Bwanika called for a rearrangement of priorities, reminding the audience of his so-called 4-way vision. But he risked sounding like Mr Museveni: "I have been around the world. Our pineapples are the sweetest in the world. Our honey is good. We can find market," he said. Really?

Rodney Muhumuza who?

The publisher of The Kampala Review is a Kampala journalist who likes to think of himself as a reporter at large. That claim is vain before it's anything else, of course, but who am I not to dream when I can? To be sure, there has been some growing up to do in the years since I penned my first post. So much, in fact, that I cringed in embarrassment when I signed in for the first time in two years. As we say in Kampala, never rush a Mirinda.