The wilderness has little respect for titles.

In 2015, Barack Obama discovered this in Alaska when Bear Grylls handed the President of the United States salmon previously sampled by a grizzly bear.

No White House chef. No presidential china. Just Barack, Grylls, and presumably one annoyed grizzly wondering who had raided his refrigerator.

But beneath the television theatre was a serious message: go to the frontier, see climate change first-hand, and make the world look too.

Watching an old video of King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV recently reminded me of Obama in Alaska.

Except the King went higher.

In 2022, Rukirabasaija exchanged the comforts of Karuzika Palace for one of Uganda’s most magnificent, and unforgiving, frontiers: the Rwenzori Mountains.

Robert Kabushenga, who has tested himself against both the Rwenzoris and Kilimanjaro, captured something mountaineers quickly discover: mountains humble you. They test your endurance.

The Rwenzoris certainly do.

Up there, royal protocol is useless. The mountain gives everyone the same bog, cold, altitude, aching muscles - and the next impossible step.

According to Robbo, as you climb, boots crunch against glacier, meltwater runs beneath ancient ice and alpine winds whistle across ridges where even conversation becomes work.

At 5,109 metres, Rukirabasaija Omukama Oyo reached Margherita Peak.

A reigning monarch had climbed to the roof of Uganda -not merely to conquer a summit, but to draw global attention to climate change, disappearing glaciers and conservation.

You know, the wild is a great leveller. And King Oyo seemed to understand it.

In Bwindi Impenetrable Forest, he tracked mountain gorillas and spoke about protecting wildlife corridors. The gorilla does not know where Uganda ends and another jurisdiction begins; nor does the wildebeest carry a passport when it thunders between Tanzania’s Serengeti and Kenya’s Maasai Mara.

Nature recognizes ecosystems, not immigration desks.

Obama would later describe the natural world as our “shared birthright.” Yet, Oyo walked into his.

And what a birthright Uganda possesses: prehistoric Rwenzori vegetation; the sharp call of the Rwenzori turaco travelling across a valley; Bwindi’s wet leaves glistening beneath shafts of sunlight; the grunt of a gorilla behind dense foliage; then the sudden percussion of a silverback beating his chest.

Usually, these places are gloriously noisy.

Today, allow me one indulgence.

I imagine them quiet.

Perhaps the turaco calls once -and pauses.

Perhaps the silverback looks across the green and, for once, does not announce himself.

Perhaps high above them all, wind crosses Margherita’s shrinking ice, whistles through the rocks and disappears into that enormous Rwenzori silence.

Nature does not mourn Kings.

But this King loved nature enough to climb into its hardest places, listen to it, speak for it—and ask us to protect it.

So today, perhaps nature can break its own rules.

The wild doesn’t care.

But for Rukirabasaija, somehow, I think it did.

Omukama Atulize. Enkuba Etutire.