The gateway to African economic revival in a place once famous only for a hijacking

‘We men don’t want to wear condoms, we want the West to find a cure.’ This dilemma, faced by HIV counsellors at the Mildmay Centre near Entebbe, mirrors that experienced by those hoping to help Uganda financially. Mukasa, a handler at the chimpanzee sanctuary on Ngamba Island, 45 minutes from Entebbe by speedboat, gives me the analogy: the chimps there are hand-reared orphans. Five times a day food for them is tossed over the fence. A Pavlovian response has developed: they come whooping through the undergrowth at set times — and can never be released into the wild, as they would not survive. They are literally sustained by handouts.

The other problem with handouts is that ‘the Big Men eat all the money’, a reference to high-level corruption heard all over Uganda — earlier this year Britain redirected £15 million of aid away from President Yoweri Museveni’s government and into the humanitarian agencies. And sometimes it’s not just the Big Men eating all the money; the pilot of the light aircraft flying me out of Entebbe to trek for gorillas tells me of a colleague who used to transport payroll cash for workers on the tea plantations. One day, on landing at the airstrip, he was surrounded by heavily armed bandits who forced him to hand over the money. Today the same pilot flies low and drops sacks of money out of the window; he is the proud owner of a certificate, hanging in the private airline’s clubhouse, for ‘retaining sphincter muscle control in the face of automatic gunfire and grenades’.

To most British people over the age of 40, Entebbe is synonymous with hijacking. In July 1976 Israel conducted a daring raid to rescue hostages from an Air France plane which had been hijacked by Palestinians and forced to land at Entebbe.