Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad

Journalist Wrong (It’s Our Turn to Eat) delivers a distressing and deeply reported exposé of Rwandan president Paul Kagame and his control over an increasingly authoritarian state. Opening with an account of how Rwandan security operatives infiltrated South Africa in 2013 to assassinate Patrick Karegeya, the former intelligence chief of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, Wrong explains how the rebel military group seized power in 1994, putting an end to 100 days of genocide between the rival Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. At the time, the two men were comrades-in-arms, and Karegeya helped facilitate Kagame’s rise to power in the new, Tutsi-led government. By 2007, Rwanda was seen by the West as a model of economic development, but Karegeya was in exile after serving a prison term for speaking out against the government’s press crackdowns, human rights abuses, and military intervention in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Wrong folds the postcolonial history of Africa’s Great Lakes region into her meticulous narrative, delineating the conflicts that wracked Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo between 1980 and 2003, and shows how Western governments, journalists, and aid organizations have failed to hold Kagame’s violent regime to account. This expert takedown packs a punch. (Mar.)