The Read: Michela Wrong, Do Not Disturb: The Story of a Political Murder and an African Regime Gone Bad
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I’ve read everything Michela Wrong has written, so of course I was going to read this too.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes. I don’t think I’d say that Wrong has a formula—her books are too thoroughly and thoughtfully reported and too sensitive to the specific accumulated details of the story or stories at the heart of the book—but she definitely has a strong, consistent perspective that draws her into the stories of African politics that she covers and that structures her writing. What she’s drawn to is not merely stories of corruption and authoritarianism, but situations where there’s some room to feel acute disappointment and disgust with rulers or a ruling regime and with outside actors who have enabled the regime or contributed to its failures. All of her books in this sense are as also about the malfeasance, greed or stupidity of Western enablers of misrule as they are about Africans misruling.
That also happens to be a precondition on some level of these stories being something she can report on, because there are archives open to her and at some point, some degree of access to the story on the ground—she couldn’t easily do a book in her style about Equatorial Guinea’s ruling family or about Muammar Gaddafi’s funding of regimes across West and Central Africa and the later consequences after Gaddafi’s fall. The slightly interesting wrinkle here is that Wrong starts the book explicitly including herself in the set of people who have contributed to the legitimacy of a misruling regime, as being one of many reporters who accepted Paul Kagame and his government as a rising “African Singapore” that would repair the wounds of a genocide and usher in an era of efficient, technocratic economic development. It also has another trademark of her work—which again, I think is something of a precondition of a story being possible to report—which is that she looks for someone (sometimes several someones) to operate as a protagonist, often a person (and their family) who is an important conduit of information for her book that she trusts. I vastly prefer that to the kind of depressingly sweeping pessimism of other Western journalists who cover contemporary African politics as a Hobbsean nightmare, but this strategy does mean that Wrong sometimes has a hard time thinking about the deeper issues and ideas that animate contemporary politics outside of the struggle between her chosen protagonist and the corrupt or authoritarian regime that opposes them once she arrives in the frame of the present day.
She raises some interesting questions at the start that haunt the book throughout that are a basic problem with covering relatively contemporary African political stories, namely, that the interior operations and deliberations of many regimes are extremely difficult to decipher from outside (and perhaps even from inside!) and the swarm of rumors and exaggerations that everyone with any political role whatsoever will relate and have related about them makes it even harder. I’ve had my own conversations with people who make what sound like utterly fantastic or paranoid claims about what officials have done or are doing and realized later that those stories have some plausibility and equally that the stories reflect deeper ideas about secrecy, indirection, political agency and intentional action.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
Like Wrong’s other books, it’s extremely teachable, though I think in this case I’d have to make a judicious decision about which part of the book to assign, because it’s long. I’ve been toying with a class on the history of espionage (or maybe another run of my surveillance course) and it would fit as well with those as any of the classes I teach on modern Africa.
Quotes
“Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, the Bush War was too successful for the good of modern Uganda or the Great Lakes region. For Museveni and his cadres emerged convinced they could both wage and win a virtuous war—a heady, dangerous belief for any armed force to hold.”
“Pursed-mouth censoriousness does not make for the most convivial of atmospheres, so Kagame was not always the most popular of drinking buddies at the get-togethers up on the hill. ‘Don’t bring him tonight,’ members of the group would sometimes urge Patrick. ‘We don’t need that stress. He spoils the atmosphere.’”
“Rwanda’s massacres, in contrast, were pre-agreed, public affairs using the most democratic of tools. There was no mystery, no ambiguity about what happened. Killing someone with a machete, sickle or hoe is a messy, exhausting business; the process leaves no room for subsequent sugarcoating.”
“Ask disillusioned former members of the RPF what first alerted them to the fact that the movement they had joined in a rush of youthful idealism had taken a turn down a dark and sinister path, and most will point to the same event: Seth Sendashonga’s death in a barrage of AK-47 fire. A little silvery salamander of shame flips over inside me whenever I hear that. If they are honest, any journalist can list a series of stories they realize, in retrospect, they either missed, played down, or misinterpreted. For me, several are associated with Rwanda’s former interior minister.”
“Ndagijimana puzzles, today, over the personal foible dictating that Sendashonga sprang loyally to the RPF’s defense whenever it was publicly assailed by westerners, even as they voiced precisely his own concerns.”
“How does anyone lightly broach the issue of someone’s role in a murder over dinner?”
“Obsessed with its dreadful past, the Rwandan population has struck the classic Faustian pact—trading freedom for peace. But most analysts wonder if the deal can survive Kagame’s departure.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
Reading Wrong’s books, I always end up feeling both sides of a repeated exchange within Africanist political science, anthropology and history. On one hand, what I appreciate so much is that there are no apologies for misrule, corruption and autocracy—even in her book on Eritrea that blamed the West for its betrayal, there’s a final reckoning with the disappointing character of the Eritrean government once it was actually established. Moreover, she takes seriously the longing of Rwandans, both as individuals and as a society, for openness and democracy and devotion to the common good, and believes in the sincerity of the disgust many feel for the murderous paranoia of the Kagame regime. On the other hand, she is often so deep inside the biographical backgrounds of the people she focuses on that the stakes of postcolonial politics end up seeming as if they’re no more than the struggle of individuals for power or the epiphany of individuals about power—any sense of ideology or worldview tends to become thin or incidental, and culture tends to compact into a series of reported generalizations and quickfire reviews of background information—Rwandans are practiced liars, cattle are everything, the history of Hutu-Tutsi identity is complicated and contested, “In Uganda, to know someone’s ethnic identity is to know their politics”. I exaggerate here a little bit; there’s a textured richness that Wrong’s work offers when she’s reporting on the fullness of a conversation about everyday life and background issues, as in the case of a discussion she has with some Ugandans in Entebbe about the intertwined history of Museveni’s Uganda and Kagame’s Rwanda. Or when she looks back into Museveni and Kagame’s early activities and perceives real political purpose before their purposes became nothing more or less than their continued hold on power. Maybe this is more of an issue as we approach the contemporary moment—the proverbial “first draft of history” often ascribed to journalism—where maybe the underlying drivers of political conflict are harder to see clearly or sort out from the animating personalities who are visibly associated with conflict.
I should add that the attention to biographical detail when it comes to major political figures is also something I appreciate, something that is generally lacking from almost all Western reportage of sub-Saharan African politics. I remember being persistently annoyed that coverage of Robert Mugabe’s rule in Zimbabwe not only never really dealt with the way in which Mugabe gained control of ZANU-PF before independence (with an efficient ruthlessness) but also that his disciplined, calculating and puritanical approach to power had discernible roots in his work as a teacher and his experience of Catholic education.
Further, it may be because I’m a historian, but I often like Wrong best when she’s narrating the political history of modern African states and their conflicts (internal and otherwise)—she writes accessible but detailed accounts that don’t just resolve into “and then bad things happened” or “the colonizers created flawed structures”. The specifics matter to her and the people she talks to, and she takes them seriously—it’s the part of her books where deeper causes and the specifics of culture, identity and political systems move much more into the forefront and intertwine richly with the biographies of her chief informants and targets.
A small thought: I wonder if everyone would still have nothing bad to say about Fred Rwingyema if he hadn’t died on the second day of the RPF’s invasion of Rwanda. Only the good die young and all that, and it often seems like only figures like Kagame or Mugabe end up in charge when the dust settles (pick your authoritarian regime outside of sub-Saharan Africa and you’ll likely see the same) but it’s also that the postcolonial state is like a possessing spirit—it takes hold of the people who think they are taking hold of it.
One thing that does come through that interests me is the extent to which the RPF’s leadership (and other Rwandan elites and expatriates) seem to have bought into and reproduced the (in my humble opinion) reductionist argument of some social scientists that because Rwanda has high population density it requires a different approach to security, government and political authority. For any academic who reassures themselves that their theories and ideas about a country or society they have studied are just some scholarly discussion and of course arguable etc. etc., it ought to be a sobering moment when you find your theories or arguments being integrated into rationalizations of autocratic rule, ethnic killings, assassinations and so on, as has happened elsewhere. But it doesn’t seem to inhibit the kind of person who likes to push monocausal arguments like “oh food insecurity causes genocide!”