Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political ­Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad
MICHELA WRONG
(FOURTH ESTATE, 512 PP, £20)
Tablet bookshop price £18 • tel 020 7799 4064

The title of Michela Wrong’s riveting and deeply disturbing account of the rise to power of the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) and its leader, Paul Kagame – Rwandan president since 2000 and de facto national leader since 1994, is taken from the notice hung on the door of a South African hotel room. Inside was the body of Kagame’s former intelligence chief, Patrick Karegeya, murdered by agents of his government on
1 January 2014. There is another dimension to this title, which unfolds over the course of the narrative. 

Wrong, long-established as one of the most authoritative writers on Africa, takes us on a journey that starts in Uganda with the Tutsi refugee community in the 1980s. These exiles joined with Yoweri Museveni’s rebels on his route to the presidency in 1986. The strength of their ambition to return to their unfamiliar homeland and reclaim power from the Hutu administration took Museveni by surprise in 1990, when they mounted an abortive invasion under the charismatic Fred Rwigyema. By 1994, the year of the genocide, he was less surprised.