On the morning of August 28, the news arrived in two hemispheres almost simultaneously. In Oslo, they announced that King Harald V had died at the National Hospital, aged 89. In Tooro Kingdom, western Uganda, they announced that King Oyo Nyimba Kabamba Iguru Rukidi IV had died, aged 34.
The two monarchs had never met, shared no language, no court and no colonial lineage. Yet they died on the same day, within hours of each other, as if some cosmic ledger had decided to balance the accounts of royalty in a single stroke: Europe’s oldest reigning monarch and one of the world’s youngest.
I have been thinking about what it means to be three years old and already claimed by history.
Harald was three when the Nazis occupied Norway in 1940, when his mother fled with him to the United States while his father and grandfather went into exile in Britain. He was three when he learnt that a country could disappear, that survival required crossing an ocean.
Forty-six years later, a different three-year-old in a different hemisphere was told that his father was dead and that he was now king. Oyo ascended the throne of Tooro in 1995, crowned ruler of a kingdom founded in the early 19th Century.
Both were three when their fates were fixed.
Harald modernised the royal house but refused to abdicate. He sailed in the Olympics. He married his school sweetheart, a commoner, after holding out against nine years of noble prospects.
Oyo, too, understood what it meant to be royal but chose to remain close to his people. By the time he was crowned at 18, he had already been king for 15 years and had started his reign promoting empowerment, education, climate conservation and HIV awareness.
But this is where the similarity ends.
Harald lived long enough to become the institution. He reigned for 35 years. He became Europe’s oldest monarch and died at 89, full of years, his son already waiting as Haakon VIII. His death was a punctuation mark at the end of a long sentence.
‘A whole nation is in mourning,’ the prime minister said. While not to be underestimated, the grief was manageable, almost anticipated.
Oyo died at 34, in what a government minister called ‘the prime of his life’. His death was sudden and tragic, leaving a kingdom struggling to process its loss. An observer noted: ‘You cannot see anyone smiling.’
The kingdom had lost its king before his reign ever truly begun. We like to believe that the death of kings means something. That it closes a chapter, or teaches us about mortality. But these deaths teach us something simpler.
A crown is heavy, whether it sits on an old man or a child.
Yet the silence of an empty throne is also an invitation. If the throne can be empty, then the throne was never the point.
Harald spent 35 years learning that a crown does not create a man; it only exposes him. In the end, a life is measured not by the length of a reign, but by what was planted during it, and whether anything green remains after the palace players have left.
They will plant a million trees in Tooro in honour of their beloved king, while in Norway flowers will be laid in Palace Square in honour of Harald.
The rest of us will go back to work, make dinner, scroll through our phones and fall asleep because that is what we do when the big moment passes.
The empty throne is a mirror that reflects the enduring power of life, and it should stir us to honour the present, a gift that those who have passed on before can no longer claim.