The State of Africa with Michela Wrong || The Human Progress Podcast Ep. 11

Renowned author and journalist Michela Wrong outlines the problems facing Africa and the reasons to be hopeful about the continent's future.  

Transcript: https://www.humanprogress.org/michela-wrong-the-human-progress-podcast-ep-11-transcript/

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.

Book: https://www.amazon.com/Do-Not-Disturb-Political-African/dp/1610398424

Half British, half Italian, Michela Wrong has spent nearly two decades writing about Africa. As a Reuters correspondent based in first Cote d'Ivoire and former Zaire, she covered the turbulent events of the mid 1990s, including the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko and Rwanda's post-genocide period. She then moved to Kenya, where she became Africa correspondent for the Financial Times. In 2000 she published her first non-fiction book, "In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz", the story of Mobutu. Her second non-fiction work, "I Didn't Do it for You", focused on the Red Sea nation of Eritrea. Her third, "It's Our Turn to Eat", tracked the story of Kenyan whistleblower John Githongo. "Borderlines", set in a fictional country in the Horn of Africa with a fiercely-disputed border, marked a move into fiction. "Do Not Disturb", which came out in 2021, is a scathing assessment of Rwanda under President Paul Kagame. She lives in London. Learn more: http://michelawrong.com/books/

Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity, and coauthor of The Simon Project. He specializes in globalization and global well‐being and politics and economics of Europe and Southern Africa.

Learn more: https://www.cato.org/people/marian-l-tupy