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Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad
Top of the pile
91
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
94/100Critics
88/100Scholars
91/100Author:
Michela Wrong
Publisher:
PublicAffairs
Date:
March 30, 2021
Wrong tells the story of the murder 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 assassination.
What The Reviewers Say
This superb book tells their entwined story, an epic tale of blood, bitterness and betrayal. On the human level, it is an absorbing Shakespearean saga in which this duo shape the history of their continent before their falling out, which led to a squalid death in a South African hotel room in the final hours of 2013. Michela Wrong, among the sharpest western writers on Africa, uses the murder of Rwanda’s affable spy chief Patrick Karegeya as a device to dissect the ugly reign of Paul Kagame, the geeky gangster president accused of being behind his former schoolmate’s death.
[This book] stands out as perhaps the most ambitious attempt yet to tell the dark story of Rwanda and the region’s deeply intertwined tragedies for a general audience. Wrong’s account unfolds on two separate planes. The first is an efficient history of the region. Most readers know little about East Central Africa’s past other than the Rwandan genocide, whose intensity and scale, Wrong notes, rank it among the greatest horrors of the 20th century. But as she makes abundantly clear, that tragedy was but one piece in an interlocking puzzle of ethnic atrocities and military gambits in the region.
In her explosive and devastatingly convincing new book, Michela Wrong contends that this is a result of the original sin coming home to roost once more. Western journalists and governments have selected their good guy in dictator Paul Kagame while ignoring his appalling human rights abuses, targeted assassinations, exported violence, and offenses against the rule of law that would be condemned anyplace else.
... devastating.
