Photograph: Anadolu/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Paul Kagame understands the value of the visual image. He loves being snapped glad-handing a dignitary at the World Economic Forum in Davos – this month, it was Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
That’s only bettered by posing back home for a selfie with former England footballer Sol Campbell – Kagame sponsors three of Europe’s top teams – who recently named a baby gorilla.
Both images, he knows, send out a message: “I’m a dynamic African president who hangs out with sexy, important people.”
The man reporters like me first met in 1994 in post-genocide Rwanda, when the country stank of human carrion, has undergone an extraordinary transformation. He’s gone from awkward, camouflage-clad rebel to sleek-suited habitué of the red carpet and banquet hall.
But there’s a vast gap between the glossy image Rwanda broadcasts and the gritty reality, as I discovered when I started researching the 2014 assassination of Patrick Karegeya, Kagame’s former intelligence chief and schoolmate. Underbellies rarely get darker than Rwanda’s.
My book exposed his regime’s ruthless pursuit, well beyond Rwanda’s borders, of opposition leaders, human rights activists and journalists, who are beaten, cowed into silence and – in the most high-profile cases – “disappeared” and killed. The US-based democracy group Freedom House calls this “transnational repression”, and lists Rwanda with the likes of Russia, China and Saudi Arabia as one of the world’s worst practitioners.
After 30 years writing about Africa, I’m no stranger to controversy. My book on one of Kenya’s worst procurement scandals was considered so “hot”, Nairobi bookshop owners hid copies under the counter. When my book on Eritrea came out, I watched it being attacked, page by page, on state television and knew I’d never get another visa there.
I sensed a book about Rwanda would take things to a whole new level, as I’d seen what had happened to other western journalists, academics and human rights investigators daring to voice anything other than sycophantic admiration for the ruling Rwandan Patriotic Front.
Outside the country, it ranged from relentless social media trolling to muscular “no platform” campaigns. Inside, some were arrested, expelled, even sent for obligatory “re-education”.
What followed still took my breath away. A tide of vilification, expressed in petition form, on specially created websites, in pseudonymous Amazon reviews, and spread by literally hundreds of anonymous social media accounts. Almost all ignored the topic of my book – Kagame’s extraterritorial assassination campaign – while repeating certain tropes.
I’d always taken it as read I would be accused of racism. What was extraordinary, though, for a journalist who reported on the 1994 genocide for Reuters and the BBC, was to be accused of “genocide denial”.
But there was method in this malevolence. Genocide denial is now an accusation hurled at pretty much any government critic – including members of Kagame’s minority Tutsis who lost loved ones during the genocide. But it’s a crime in Rwanda, carrying a potential 10-year sentence, so I could in theory be arrested if I boarded a plane touching down in Kigali. When a Brussels restaurant owner cancelled my event after a tsunami of tweets and emails, I wondered if I even needed to worry about being arrested in Belgium. Rwandan government supporters have pushed for the EU’s laws on Holocaust denial to embrace supposed “negationists” like me.
Learning the allegation that a British PR company played a key role in orchestrating all this triggered a momentary surge of rage.
I had certainly registered the anonymous handles and minuscule numbers of followers on most of the accounts attacking me, giveaways they weren’t actually run by outraged Rwandan citizens.
I’d also clocked how many of the attacks supposedly penned by Rwandan and Ugandan book reviewers were expressed in suspiciously perfect English. But I’d still assumed only Rwandan embassy officials or intelligence officers in Kigali were involved.
It was shocking but strangely validating to read in an intelligence file, as reported on Sunday, the claim that the Chelgate PR agency – a company operating in my own city and staffed by fellow Brits – had also been at work. The spotless English, the methodical relentlessness, the identikit nature of the slurs, suddenly made sense. Chelgate has denied operating the accounts.
There were industry terms for these techniques, I discovered: “astroturfing”, “straw man accounts” and “sockpuppetry”. Who knew?
Being told that you are being professionally targeted is a jolting psychological experience. The old joke – “Just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get me” – suddenly has a new relevance. I often wake screaming in the night, convinced Rwandan agents have broken into my flat. In the morning, I sometimes find chairs, duvets and pillows stuffed against the front door: my anxiety has bubbled up in my sleep. A therapist would probably mutter “PTSD”.
And three years of sustained online attacks on your reputation can’t help but have a professional impact, however unquantifiable. Anyone thinking of inviting me to speak at a conference or write an article will, on Googling my name, be presented with a list of accusations only the most stout-hearted – or those who know Rwanda – will casually brush away.
Luckily, I am in the latter part of my career and as a freelancer, I have no boss who can be bullied into sacking me. Most of the people who commission my work have known me for decades and probably assume I have not suddenly changed.
But the constant attacks do work their way into the psyche. I have become more suspicious, more defensive. There are many topics I now won’t discuss on the phone or on email: Rwanda’s use of Pegasus spyware is well documented. I enjoy public speaking far less than I used to: Salman Rushdie’s near-death experience haunts me. I have to force myself to use X, where each time I see three or four fresh sockpuppet accounts latching on.
I realise I have come to resemble my interviewees, and the society they fled. The Rwandan exiles I know only ever meet in public, lower their voices and look over their shoulders when chatting, and switch tables in cafes and restaurants when they fear someone is eavesdropping. I do all those things now, too.
It’s not the Rwanda you see in the Davos selfies, but it’s the Rwanda I know.
• Michela Wrong, former correspondent for Reuters and the Financial Times, is the author of five books on Africa
