Re-examining Rwanda and the Somali refugee experience

Two new non-fiction books challenge international perceptions of well-known African stories.

Michela Wrong’s Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad, investigates the assassination of Patrick Karegeya, a former Rwandan intelligence chief.

Behind his killing, she details, was the Rwandan regime and president Paul Kagame, the man praised for ending his country’s brutal 1994 genocide and leading the small Great Lakes country into an unprecedented period of peace, stability and development. Karegeya is described as a charismatic man who grew disillusioned with the regime he played a large part in creating. This book – which contains the rich details and extensive research characteristic of Wrong’s reporting – expands the story far beyond his murder to the history of Rwanda and its neighbours, and the aftermath of one of the most brutal events in human memory.

The book’s title comes from the sign Karegeya’s killers hung on the door of the South African hotel room he was strangled in, but Wrong says it was also an “injunction” that “Western outsiders were all too ready to embrace”. For a host of NGO workers, development officials and philanthropists, many of whom felt guilty that the international community did not stop the genocide, questioning Rwanda’s leadership would mean “toppling the pillars on which they had constructed their careers”, she writes.

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Bill Clinton called Kagame “one of the greatest leaders of our time”; Tony Blair called him “a visionary”; and Mary Robinson flanked Kagame at events commemorating the 20th anniversary of the genocide, shortly after Karegeya was killed.

Wrong, a former Financial Times correspondent, has covered Africa for decades. Her interviews with former members of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) ruling party are fascinating. A former US ambassador, who became Kagame’s chief of staff, compares RPF culture to George Orwell’s Animal Farm or Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. He describes becoming a “salesman” for the new Rwandan regime abroad, evoking guilt to garner support and make foreign diplomats too ashamed to ask pertinent questions. Wrong says no African government curates its public image more assiduously than Rwanda. Yet, Kagame, “a vengeful Pilato”, is known to physically beat senior members of his government and military, while using a range of tactics to eliminate challengers. RPF officials are said to read The 48 Laws of Power, a 1998 bestseller by Robert Greene, in which law number one is “never outshine the master”.

Last year, international attention was drawn to Rwanda when Paul Rusesabagina, a US Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient whose story was told in the film Hotel Rwanda, was tricked into boarding a flight to Kigali and put on trial under terrorism charges. Do Not Disturb is a must-read for anyone keen to question their understanding again.

The refugee experience

Ty McCormick’s Beyond the Sand and Sea: One Family’s Quest for a Country to Call Home, was published on the same day as Wrong’s book. It documents the struggle of a Somali family in Dadaab refugee camp, eastern Kenya, who are trying to get resettled to the US to restart their lives – which may differ from how a lot of Western readers perceive the refugee experience.

“In Dadaab refugee camp, no one is master of his fate,” writes McCormick, while describing his main protagonist, Asad Hussein’s, love of William Ernest Henley’s poetry. Hussein largely educated himself, reading books donated by American charities. He eventually travelled to the US with a scholarship to study in Princeton University – the first person born in Dadaab to do so.

McCormick is the former Africa editor for Foreign Policy magazine. His writing is beautiful and makes it easy to become engaged in Hussein’s mission, as well as the struggles faced by Dadaab’s broader population.

Some 14,000 refugees in Dadaab, who were at various stages of a process leading to resettlement to the US, were affected by former US president Donald Trump’s travel ban. But this book also offers an insight into the constant bureaucratic hurdles that refugees face daily and how Hussein’s family is repeatedly failed by the organisations which are supposed to protect them.

My own reporting on allegations of corruption within the UN Refugee Agency is mentioned in the book. In 2018, I visited Dadaab, interviewing refugees who alleged they were sexually exploited by UN staff or asked to pay bribes in return for progression in their resettlement cases. McCormick, too, uncovers testimony from more than a dozen refugees who say they were asked for either bribes or sex in exchange for medical certificates needed for travel. If they refused, their cases were put on hold.

Even in the US, life is not easy. In Princeton, Hussein – a skilled wordsmith himself – attends a class focused on writing about refugees’ experiences, only to realise he is the only refugee in the room.

Despite what he has achieved, this is no simple success story, but that makes it even more important to read.