dignity, he was the first African leader to meet
with President Trump after his infamous reference
to “sh-t hole countries.” He let it pass. “If anyone
insulted Rwanda or me, then I try to make sense of
it,” Kagame says. “I say, What is it that gives basis
to this kind of thing?”
He appears less inclined toward introspection
on the question of his own extended tenure and
what it might say about the quality of Rwandan
democracy. “There is a tendency to think these Af-
rican leaders, they’re just there to do wrong things
to their own people,” Kagame says. “They’re so
bad, they don’t even know what is good for them.”
He says he “wanted to leave” when his last term
expired and had to be coaxed into running in the
election in which, by the official tally, he won 99%
of the vote. A key rival, Diane Rwigara,
was first barred from running and then
arrested.
“I’m not a leader fraudulently,”
Kagame says. “I’ve made investments.
My investments are not about
infringing on people’s rights. I’m not
that kind of person.”
One danger of remaining in office
for decades, of course, lies in what
comes next. Kagame says his party
is not grooming a successor. “That
becomes more or less a monarchy or
something like that,” he says. But by
many measures he already qualifies
as a strongman, albeit one who takes
the presidential Gulfstream G650 to
an Ivy League graduation rather than
on a shopping trip to Paris (a common
destination of the continent’s more
kleptomaniacal rulers).
“I have fought for my own freedom,”
he says, only slightly animated in
his defiance. “I have fought for the
freedom of my people better than these
supervisors who come and say, ‘Well,
you are doing this. You know, don’t
do this.’ No! I know what I am doing. I
know what is good for me. I don’t need
to be told by anybody.”
Rwanda’s President lights up at
the suggestion that perhaps, in some
quarters, more is to be expected of
his government because it stopped
the genocide—the idea being that the
people who ended a great evil must be
heroically virtuous. But human-rights
groups argue that every crime is equal:
just as those who ordered the genocide
faced international justice, so should
commanders accused of orchestrating
revenge killings. This debate has been
going on since 1994, and it is snarled
in a dark history. Kagame’s forces pur-
sued the genocidaires into the forests
of the Democratic Republic of Congo
and there prosecuted a pair of wars that
claimed some 5 million lives, mostly by
starvation and disease.
“Every problem about that situation
has been sitting on our shoulders,” says
Kagame, who is having none of it. “We
are being blamed because we are still
alive. If we are not”—he laughs—“they
would have nobody to blame. I think
between surviving and being blamed
and not surviving, it is obvious. The
choice is very clear.” •
‘I know what
I am doing. I
know what is
good for me.
I don’t need
to be told by
anybody.’
PAUL KAGAME,
President of Rwanda
CELESTE SLOMAN FOR TIME
13
