LONDON – I used to jog down the back roads of Jinja, the old cotton center laid bare by 15 years of murderous civil war. There was a dirt-covered sign pointing to a rutted road: “To the source of the Nile.” I would cut through the long grass and the sweet smell of jacaranda and frangipani, past the long abandoned Mango Café, and arrive at a sharp cleft in the hill. There, nestling below, the headwaters of the Nile burst into view. No wonder, I would think, that Winston Churchill called Uganda “the pearl of Africa, a fairy tale land”. But in mind’s eye I could see the future and now it has arrived. Two hotels have grabbed the spot. And there is a plan, well advanced, to build a dam to provide electricity for Uganda’s rushing economic development. The country’s untamed beauty, preserved by misrule and war, is being...
