When Yale University invited Rwandan President Paul Kagame to deliver the annual Coca-Cola World Fund Lecture on September 20, it predictably provoked protests on the campus. Students said they did not want a leader who was accused of violating human rights and stifling free speech in his home country on their campus. The university, also predictably, exalted him on its Web page: “Kagame has received recognition for his leadership in numerous areas, including peace building and reconciliation, development, good governance, promotion of human rights and women’s empowerment, and the advancement of education and information and communications technology…”
The reason I say that both these reactions are predictable is because of the two Rwandas that Anjan Sundaram writes about in his book Bad News: Last Journalists in a Dictatorship : “One for its visitors and another for its citizens”. Sundaram writes: “[It’s] a world in which the streetlights seemed wonderful signs of progress, another in which they were frightening.”
Kagame, he tells us, would go to any length to show the outside world that Rwanda is a picture of progress. And what better way to do this than by choking freedom of expression within the country?
Sundaram, a journalist who has reported from Central Africa for publications such as The New York Times and the Associated Press, writes about the Kagame regime between 2009 and 2013 when he was invited to become a tutor for a journalism programme funded by Britain and the European Union for Rwandan journalists. FULL STORY
