Kigali felt muggy on July 20, the temperature unusually high. The police and army were on high alert at every corner as the Rwandan capital was getting ready for the big political event. About to begin was the two-week election campaign leading up to presidential elections on August 9.
A little over a decade after a terrifying genocide left a million people dead, Rwanda has recovered enough to become a tourist destination in central Africa. As veteran journalist Stephen Kinzer reports in his new book A Thousand Hills, Rwanda is an orderly, peaceful, and economically developing oasis in an otherwise strife-torn region. Kinzer points to Rwandan leader Paul Kagame as the prime mover behind this transformation. Ever the cautious journalist, Kinzer knows the pitfalls of this great-man approach to history. “Naïve outsiders, eager for success stories from Africa, are quick to praise any promising leader. Sometimes they are too quick,” he writes. And indeed, fellow journalist Mark Fritz took Kinzer to task in The Washington Post for being too quick himself.
Someone very important is visiting Africa, specifically five countries including Tanzania, Rwanda, Benin, Ghana, and Liberia. He is the president of the United States of America. The hassles of hosting a U.S. president are bad enough. His people take over your whole country and make our normally inefficient states go into overdrive and our egregious first ladies and their husbands go into overkill to show their hospitality. We never knew many of them could bend their knees until they were leading cleaning troops across the capitals in preparation for Clinton’s visit in 1998 from Kampala to Accra!
Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo signed an agreement on July 30, promising to put an end to the war that has raged in Congo since 1998. However, it is too soon to rejoice. The signatories are deeply suspicious of one another, and implementation of the agreement could break down.