Nicholas Shakespeare

The making of a monster: Paul Kagame’s bloodstained past

Rwanda’s President has been widely feted as ‘the man who ended the genocide’. But he may also have started it, according to Michela Wrong

‘God created me in a very strange way,’ Paul Kagame once told an obsequious interviewer. Credit: Alamy
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  • Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad

    Michela Wrong

    Fourth Estate, pp. 336, £20

In June, Commonwealth heads of government will meet in the Rwandan capital Kigali, a city advertised by their Tutsi host, the 63-year-old Paul Kagame, as ‘the Davos of Africa’. Kagame, Rwanda’s de facto leader since 1994 — and boasting more honorary degrees than Barack Obama, although he never finished high school — has become the ‘donor darling’ of the international community.

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Because you read about genocide

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