Uganda - Mbarara and Ankole Country

The maxim for most dangerous places is, don't go unless you have to. That's not what you hear about the town of Mbarara and Ankole country just north of Rwanda and Tanzania, where you still find, after years of the white man's devastating rinderpest, longhorn Ankole cattle. Not unlike Tutsi cattle, they are owned by a tall, dark aristocracy, descended like the Watutsi from northern invaders who seized a Bantu-speaking kingdom. Here, the serfs are the Hima people, the aristocrats, the Ankole.

This is the region through which Henry Morton Stanley (the explorer who presumed to discover Dr. Livingstone) passed in 1875 on his way to meet Mutesa, king of Buganda, and what you hear about it is don't let the danger keep you away.

For one, it's beautiful, often the spare, dry beauty of the savanna rather than the ever-lush beauty of Buganda just to the north. (Buganda's deep green light filtering through banana groves colors the Uganda of our imagination.) For another, there is both the human and animal population. Mbarara is not an unusual African town, but then you begin to realize how combat tore the place up, and how other towns, similarly battered, still languish in a decrepit state. It's bracing to experience the resilience of this much patched place. Gusty jambos in a town with cheap hotels sporting names like The Super Tip Top Lodge Bar & Restaurant; this is Africa? Wildlife is devastated, but just when you think it is utterly gone, there it is. And seeing it in such circumstances, the sudden appearance of a bull eland brings a melancholy rush.

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