DO NOT DISTURB, the story of a political murder and an African regime gone bad

488pp., illus., maps, paperback, London, 2021

Michaela Wrong on the career of Paul Kagame and the Rwandan genocide.

"In this extremely important and profoundly disturbing book, Michela Wrong sets out all the miss-steps that were ignored, all the flagrant human rights abuses that were overlooked and all the criminality for which excuses were found, until the new horrors that have been visited upon that country were perpetrated." Archbishop Desmond Tutu

"Michaela Wrong takes her readers on an absorbing political journey, in which Rwandan comrades-in-arms Paul Kagame and Patrick Karegeya steadily mutate into lethal adversaries upon achieving power. The ghosts of other historic fallouts - Stalin and Trotsky, Sankara and Compaore, Robespierre and Danton, Mugabe and Mujuru - haunt this story, but more importantly, it draws attention to the significant structural problems created by ex-military leaders' participation in the building of post-war democracy and peace." Miles Tendi, author of The Army and Politics in Zimbabwe: Mujuru, the liberation fighter and kingmaker

“The author raises the curtain on a dystopian landscape too long ignored and left ‘undisturbed’ by too many observers. Through countless interviews with key actors, including the central figure in her narrative, Patrick Karegeya, the author paints a frightening picture of Rwanda as a police state with all the hallmarks of the Stalinist era, where opponents to the regime are not disappeared because they are guilty but whose disappearance is sufficient proof of their culpability. Refreshingly free of jargon, the book breaks important new ground in the literature on Rwanda, in lively and suspenseful prose. This is revisionist history at its best. I cannot recommend it too highly.” René Lemarchand, author of Rwanda and Burundi

Journalist Michaela Wrong has covered events in Africa for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times.  Her first book, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, won the PEN James Sterne Prize for non-fiction. I Didn’t Do It for You (2006) focuses on the nation of Eritrea and It's Our Turn to Eat (2009) on the career of Kenyan whistleblower John Githongo. In 2015, she published Borderlines, her first novel. She lives in London.