Do Not Disturb
The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad
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Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2022
‘Superb’ The Times
‘Engrossing and revelatory' Observer
‘Powerful, compelling and meticulously researched’ New Statesman
A new book from the award winning author of In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz,Do Not Disturb explores the controversial career of Paul Kagame and the legacy of the Rwandan genocide
Do Not Disturb is a dramatic recasting of the modern history of Africa’s Great Lakes region, an area blighted by the greatest genocide of the twentieth century. This bold retelling, vividly sourced by direct testimony from key participants, tears up the traditional script.
In the old version, an idealistic group of young rebels overthrows a genocidal regime in Kigali, ushering in an era of peace and stability that makes Rwanda the donor darling of the West, winning comparisons with Switzerland and Singapore. The new version examines afresh questions which dog the recent past: Why do so many ex-rebels scoff at official explanations of who fired the missile that killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi? Why didn’t the mass killings end when the rebels took control? Why did those same rebels, victory secured, turn so ruthlessly on one another?
Michela Wrong uses the story of Patrick Karegeya, once Rwanda’s head of external intelligence and a quicksilver operator of supple charm, to paint the portrait of a modern African dictatorship created in the chilling likeness of Paul Kagame, the president who sanctioned his former friend’s murder.
‘A withering assault on the murderous regime of Kagame, and a melancholy love song to the last dreams of the African Great Lakes’ John Le Carre
About the author
Michela Wrong is a distinguished international journalist, and has worked as a foreign correspondent covering events across the African continent for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times. She writes regularly for the New Statesman. Based on her experiences in Africa, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, her first book, won the PEN James Sterne Prize for non-fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
