It was with the greatest pleasure and pride that I received the command of The Queen to be Her Majesty’s special representative at the Independence Celebrations of Uganda and my wife and I deeply appreciate the welcome which Uganda has given us since our arrival here on Sunday.

The First World War did away with some of the most powerful and colorful monarchies and empires the World had known. The Ottoman Empire, the Austro Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire,  the German Monarchy all were overnight swept away by the tide of history. In Africa despite the tide and despite European colonial aggression or maybe because of it, kings and monarchies remained in vogue and even flourished.

One of the little-known stories, especially to young Ugandans born in the last three decades, is the stunning manner in which Apollo Milton Obote, Uganda’s first post-independence Prime Minister, emerged out of nowhere to upstage better-placed political rivals.

Loud and brash, in gaudy garb and baseball caps, more than three million of them flock to our shores every year. Shuffling between tourist sites or preparing to negotiate a business deal, they bemoan the failings of the world outside the United States.

The debate about American influence on the world is not new. The popular twentieth century notion of the ugly American was part of this. Charles Dickens, the great seventeenth century novelist, believed American culture had little to offer the world. In his opinion America’s culture icons were no more than a gang of fakes, fools and tricksters

When in 1969 Apollo 11 blasted into space, it created a rare moment of pure magic at an African school and its entire neighborhood in the little coastal town of Likoni opposite the famed Island resort of Mombasa in Kenya ...In class Seven we talked endlessly about the forthcoming voyage to the Moon; the greatest voyage mankind had ever made.

Just occasionally, a writer or artist, or both in one, emerges who is so astoundingly original that everything else suddenly seems like a facsimile of what has come before. Chris Ware, the 45-year-old American comic artist, is one of these. Widely hailed as one of the foremost practitioners working in the medium today, his new book, if one can call it that without being reductionist, is a work of such startling genius that it is difficult to know where to begin.

Bar Martin Luther King, Barack Obama is the finest political orator in American living memory. His supporters are dumbstruck that in the debate with his challenger for the November vote his performance was so weak. He didn’t even mention Mitt Romney’s absurd statement that he has written off 47% of Americans because they depend on government handouts.