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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor for The Spectator.

And my guest this week is the veteran foreign correspondent Michaela Rong, whose new book is Do Not Disturb the story of a political

murder and an African regime gone bad. Now the regime in question is Rwanda, and the thesis

of the book, if I'm not over-simplifying it, is that Paul Kagami, the president of Rwanda and a great, you know, donor darling, as you put it, is in fact a very, very, very bad man indeed.

Can you start by talking about how that realisation sort of came, snuck up on you, if you like, because obviously for a long time he was the great hero who saved Rwanda from the genocide.

And of course, to many people, he is still exactly that.

And the reason I wrote the book was to try and correct that widespread impression.

I think I went through a trajectory that a lot of journalists, diplomats, aid workers, people who engaged with Rwanda went through.

I think I'm sort of fairly typical of a part of that community in that I went into Rwanda immediately after the genocide when the bodies were still fresh in the fields.

And, you know, the horror and the grotesque violence that you could see all around you,

there were sort of blood stains all over the church aisles.

And you could see there were freshly dug graves and where thousands of people have been very hurriedly buried.

And so, you know, between 500,000 and a million, mostly Tutsis have been killed in the

...