Michela Wrong

A powerful investigation into a grisly killing that leads to an unravelling of the benign image of Rwanda, a country showered with Western aid while its leaders began a bloody killing spree of their political opponents. Patrick Karegeya was strangled in a luxury hotel room in Johannesburg. It was no casual act of violence, because Karegeya was a Rwandan spy chief turned dissident. When word of his death reached Rwanda, the reaction especially among his former friends and colleagues was jarringly gleeful. "When you choose to be a dog, you die like a dog," Rwanda's defense minister declared, "and the cleaners will wipe away the trash so that it does not stink." Rwandan President Paul Kagame, while denying that Rwanda had anything to do with the killing-"it's a big 'no'"-quickly sounded as though he wanted the credit: "I actually wish Rwanda did it. I really wish it." Michela Wrong knew Patrick Karegeya well, and her investigation into the plot to kill him reveals a sinister political murder sanctioned at the highest level-in every way comparable with the killing by Saudi Arabia of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi. It is a chilling example of the newly acceptable art of political murder abroad. And in tracing the origins of the murder, Wrong shows that the story the West told itself about the ideals of plucky Rwanda overlooked a fundamental and sinister moral flaw; it was a regime unafraid to kill its opponents in cold blood, wherever they lived around the world. Rwanda under Kagame has become a deadly autocracy. It is as ruthless as it is corrupt, and Karegeya's assassination was just part of a widespread campaign of extra-judicial killings, kidnappings, renditions, beatings, death threats and surveillance waged abroad with impunity.

The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad

Do Not Disturb

Scarred by decades of conflict and occupation, the craggy African nation of Eritrea has weathered the world's longest-running guerrilla war. The dogged determination that secured victory against Ethiopia, its giant neighbor, is woven into the national psyche, the product of cynical foreign interventions. Fascist Italy wanted Eritrea as the springboard for a new, racially pure Roman empire; Britain sold off its industry for scrap; the United States needed a base for its state-of-the-art spy station; and the Soviet Union used it as a pawn in a proxy war. In I Didn't Do It for You, Michela Wrong reveals the breathtaking abuses this tiny nation has suffered and, with a sharp eye for detail and a taste for the incongruous, tells the story of colonialism itself and how international power politics can play havoc with a country's destiny.

How the World Betrayed a Small African Nation

I Didn't Do It for You

When Michela Wrong's Kenyan friend John Githongo appeared one cold February morning on the doorstep of her London flat, carrying a small mountain of luggage and four trilling mobile phones he seemed determined to ignore, it was clear something had gone very wrong in a country regarded until then as one of Africa's few budding success stories. Two years earlier, in the wave of euphoria that followed the election defeat of long-serving President Daniel arap Moi, John had been appointed Kenya's new anti-corruption czar. In choosing this giant of a man with a booming laugh, respected as a longstanding anti-corruption crusader, the new government was signalling to both its own public and the world at large that it was set on ending the practices that had made Kenya an international by-word for sleaze. Now John was on the run, having realised that the new administration, far from breaking with the past, was using near-identical techniques to pilfer public funds. John's tale, which has all the elements of the political thriller, is the story of how a brave man came to make a lonely decision with huge ramifications. But his story transcends the personal, touching as it does on the cultural, historical and social themes that lie at the heart of the continent's continuing crisis. Tracking this story of an African whistleblower who started out as a pillar of the establishment, Michela Wrong seeks answers to the questions that have puzzled outsiders for decades. What is it about African society that makes corruption so hard to eradicate, so sweeping in its scope, so destructive in its impact? Why have so many African presidents found it so easy to reduce all political discussion to the self-serving calculation of which tribe gets to "eat"? And at what stage will Africans start placing the wider interests of their nation ahead of the narrow interests of their tribe?

The Story of a Kenyan Whistleblower

It's Our Turn to Eat

A gripping account of both an individual caught on the horns of an excruciating moral dilemma and a continent at a turning point.

It’s Our Turn to Eat

its our turn to eat

Mr Kurtz, the colonial white master, brought evil to the remote upper reaches of the Congo River. A century after Conrad's Heart of Darkness was first published, Michela Wrong revisits the Congo during the turbulent era of Mobutu Sese Seko. From the heart of Africa comes grotesque confusion: pink-lipsticked rebel soldiers mingle with track-suited secret policemen in hotels where fin de siecle dinner parties are ploughing through vintage wines rather than leave them to the new regime. Congo, the African country richest in natural resources, has institutionalised kleptomania. Everyone is one the take. Someone has even swiped one of the uranium rods from the country's only nuclear reactor. Having presided over unprecedented looting of the country's wealth, Mobutu, like Kurtz, retreated deep within the jungle to his palace of marble floors and gold taps. A hundred years on and nothing has changed.

Living on the Brink of Disaster in the Congo

In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2022 'Superb' The Times 'Engrossing and revelatory' Observer 'Powerful, compelling and meticulously researched' New Statesman A new book from the award winning author of In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz,Do Not Disturb explores the controversial career of Paul Kagame and the legacy of the Rwandan genocide Do Not Disturb is a dramatic recasting of the modern history of Africa's Great Lakes region, an area blighted by the greatest genocide of the twentieth century. This bold retelling, vividly sourced by direct testimony from key participants, tears up the traditional script. In the old version, an idealistic group of young rebels overthrows a genocidal regime in Kigali, ushering in an era of peace and stability that makes Rwanda the donor darling of the West, winning comparisons with Switzerland and Singapore. The new version examines afresh questions which dog the recent past: Why do so many ex-rebels scoff at official explanations of who fired the missile that killed the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi? Why didn't the mass killings end when the rebels took control? Why did those same rebels, victory secured, turn so ruthlessly on one another? Michela Wrong uses the story 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 murder. 'A withering assault on the murderous regime of Kagame, and a melancholy love song to the last dreams of the African Great Lakes' John Le Carre

A powerful investigation into a grisly political murder and the authoritarian regime behind it: Do Not Disturb upends the narrative that Rwanda sold the world after one of the deadliest genocides of the twentieth century. We think we know the story of Africa’s Great Lakes region. Following the Rwandan genocide, an idealistic group of young rebels overthrew the brutal regime in Kigali, ushering in an era of peace and stability that made Rwanda the donor darling of the West, winning comparisons with Switzerland and Singapore. But the truth was considerably more sinister. Vividly sourcing her story with direct testimony from key participants, Wrong uses 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.

The debut novel by a British writer with nearly two decades of African experience - a compelling courtroom drama and a gritty, aromatic evocation of place, inspired by recent events. British lawyer Paula Shackleton is mourning a lost love when a small man in a lemon-coloured suit accosts her over breakfast in a Boston hotel. Winston Peabody represents the African state of North Darrar, embroiled in a border arbitration case with its giant neighbour. He needs help with the hearings in The Hague, Paula needs to forget the past. She flies to the state's capital determined to lose herself in work, but soon discovers that even jobs taken with the purest intentions can involve moral compromise. Taking testimony in scorching refugee camps, delving into the colonial past, she becomes increasingly uneasy about her role. Budding friendships with a scarred former rebel and an idealistic young doctor whittle away at her pose of sardonic indifference, until Paula finds herself taking a step no decent lawyer should ever contemplate. Michela Wrong has been writing about Africa for two decades. In this taut legal thriller, rich with the Horn of Africa's colours and aromas, she probes the motives underlying Western engagement with the continent, questioning the value of universal justice and exploring how history itself is forged. Above all her first novel is the story of a young woman's anguished quest for redemption.

Borderlines

Known as "the Leopard," the president of Zaire for thirty-two years, Mobutu Sese Seko, showed all the cunning of his namesake -- seducing Western powers, buying up the opposition, and dominating his people with a devastating combination of brutality and charm. While the population was pauperized, he plundered the country's copper and diamond resources, downing pink champagne in his jungle palace like some modern-day reincarnation of Joseph Conrad's crazed station manager. Michela Wrong, a correspondent who witnessed Mobutu's last days, traces the rise and fall of the idealistic young journalist who became the stereotype of an African despot. Engrossing, highly readable, and as funny as it is tragic, In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz assesses the acts of the villains and the heroes in this fascinating story of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Living on the Brink of Disaster in the

In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz

A new book from the award winning author of In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz, Do Not Disturb explores the controversial career of Paul Kagame and the legacy of the Rwandan genocide

Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad

The debut novel by a British writer with nearly two decades of African experience – a compelling courtroom drama and a gritty, aromatic evocation of place, inspired by recent events.

One small East African country embodies the battered history of the continent: patronised by colonialists, riven by civil war, confused by Cold War manoeuvring, proud, colorful, with Africa's best espresso and worst rail service. Michela Wrong brilliantly reveals the contradictions and comedy, past and present, of Eritrea.

I Didn’t Do It For You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation (Text Only)

A story of grim comedy amid the apocalypse and a celebration of the sheer indestructibility of the human spirit in a nation run riot: Michela Wrong’s vision of Congo/Zaire during the Mobutu years is incisive, ironic and revelatory.

Michela Wrong

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