The Brief Time With...Paul Kagame

Rwandan President Paul Kagame Is Happy To Discuss What Makes An African Strongman.

- Karl Vick

PERSONAL BUSINESS IS WHAT’S BROUGHT THE President of Rwanda to Manhattan. Paul Kagame’s daughter is graduating from Columbia University with a master’s degree in international affairs. “I probably will have to come back in two weeks again,” Kagame says of his U.S. visit, in a room in the Park Hyatt, half a block south of Central Park. “My son is graduating from Williams College.”

His country, meanwhile, is marking an anniversary. It was 25 years ago that some 1 million Rwandans were murdered, a genocide that went unchecked by Western governments. The slaughter lasted until guerrilla forces led by Kagame drove the killers from the country that he has ruled since—six years in the de facto capacity of Vice President and since 2000 as President.

The trauma still defines Rwanda, not least in the minds of foreigners. “We live kind of under that shadow,” Kagame says, adding, in the abstract terms he prefers, “It is just one set of narratives built around a geographically small country in the heart of the continent of Africa. They may not even bother to know where it is or even what it is.”

What Rwanda is, even before the genocide, is an unusual parcel of East Africa: made up entirely of hills, with a population of 12 million extremely organized from the center outward—prefecture, commune, sector. The genocidaires used that organization to mobilize the slaughter by ethnic Hutu extremists against the ethnic Tutsi minority. That organization survived the genocide and in the quarter- century since has reported to Kagame.

What has he done with it? It depends on whom you ask.

“Twenty-five years on, we have built a stable society, a stable economy,” Kagame says. “We are developing. Everything is still a work in progress, but you can measure and understand where we have been and where we are now.”