ABSTRACT
It is a hot and cloudless day and Kampala’s heavy traffic is slowly crawling around the roadblocks and diversions which ring the centre of Uganda’s capital. It is Friday 23 November 2007, and the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) has just concluded. Leaders make their way up the stairs of the Serena Conference Centre, like much of central Kampala transformed in recent years. The new Asian owners have given it a modern and vaguely exotic air, all but erasing the memory that it was here, in what was formerly Nile Mansions, where Idi Amin was rumoured to keep human remains in his fridge and where Milton Obote’s torture chamber and charnel house were located. In an airy reception room overlooking the city, the Secretary-General, Don McKinnon, is hosting a reception for heads of government to meet representatives of the media and other guests.
