Rwandan President Paul Kagame. (Photo: EPA-EFE / Justin Lane)

Kagame’s ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front ‘has gone from a band of brothers who invaded Rwanda in 1990 and toppled a genocidal regime, to a revolution eating its own’, author Michela Wrong told the Cape Town Press Club on Wednesday.

South Africa, like most countries, is failing to stand up to the bullying of Rwandan President Paul Kagame and is allowing him to increasingly become the dominant African leader.

“And that’s something I find both puzzling and depressing,” says Michela Wrong, the British author of Do Not Disturb, an investigation of the Rwandan government’s assassinations of opponents in foreign countries and other crimes. 

Kagame’s ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) “has gone from a band of brothers who invaded Rwanda in 1990 and toppled a genocidal regime, to a revolution eating its own”, Wrong told the Cape Town Press Club on Wednesday.

“One of my aims was to point out that recent Rwandan history is not a simplistic story of Hutus versus Tutsis, as we tend to assume. It’s a story of a dictator who is determined to cut down any possible challengers, whatever their ethnicity. He doesn’t care whether they are Hutus or Tutsis, the question is whether they pose a viable threat.”