Summary: An exceptional, and exceptionally courageous, study of Paul Kagame’s Rwandan dictatorship

I’ve been a fan of Michela Wrong since her first book exploring the history of Congo, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz. Her subsequent books on Eritrea, and particularly, on Kenyan corruption have been excellent.

Do Not Disturb is, however, by far her best book. It is an extraordinary work exploring the path to power of Paul Kagame, the President of Rwanda.

Kagame, and Rwanda, have been the darlings of Western aid donors for decades. As Wrong points out he’s a regular at Davos. Both Labour and Conservative UK governments have fawned over him, and his musings pop up from time to time in the Guardian.

Which is all quite strange because it has been plain for decades that Kagame is a psychotic war criminal. He has waged illegal war. His armies have plundered eastern Congo with vicious abandon. He has assassinated democratic opponents in foreign lands. And he has massacred civilians both at home in Rwanda and abroad. In other words, Wrong details the atrocities of a man as rapacious of Central Africa as the worst of the colonial powers.

Since his earliest days as an intelligence officer in the Ugandan bush, Kagame has never been one to put himself in harm’s way. However he is an enthusiastic giver of orders, sending others out to murder on his behalf. As president Kagame has shown himself a petty bully as well as a murderous dictator.

Alongside Kagame’s story Wrong explores the careers of, among others, Fred Rwigyema, Rwanda’s lost leader, killed in disputed circumstances in 1990 shortly after the RPF invaded Rwanda, Seth Sendashonga, Rwanda’s first post-genocide interior minister, a democratic Hutu politician assassinated on Kagame’s orders, probably with the assistance of Patrick Karegeya, whose own assassination opens the book and whose story provides a thread through the narrative.

Given all of this, the book is not just an exemplary work of history and journalism, it is also a work of extraordinary courage. Wrong knows how vindictive Kagame is, and how murderous his state apparatus is: she details it here. Nevertheless she has done the whole of the Great Lakes region an immense service, by exposing in such unflinching detail Kagame’s corrupt brutality.

If, over the past two decades, donor governments had shown but a modicum of Wrong’s courage perhaps Central Africa would have fewer graves. Maybe now, at least, Kagame may have fewer preening op-eds in the pages of the Guardian.