Is Rwanda turning into a country that seeks regional dominance and exterminates its rivals?
This is a contention examined by Dr Michela Wrong, and Dr Maria Armoudian.
Dr Wrong is a journalist who has written best-selling books on Africa. Her latest, Do Not Disturb. The story of a political murder and an African regime gone bad, focuses on the tiny central African nation of Rwanda and the activities of its President Paul Kagame.
In the mid to late 1990s she covered the genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath as a young reporter for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times. Like many of the journalists, aid workers and diplomats commenting on those turbulent events, she initially saw the Rwandan Patriotic Front and its leaders as benign players whose intervention spelt a welcome end to grotesque levels of inter-ethnic violence.
Her book is in many ways a reckoning with her own naivety, a careful critique of the lazy narrative to which too many members of the international community still stubbornly cling.
Dr Armoudian is a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland . She has written extensively about the role of the media in international affairs. In her book, Kill the Messenger: The Media's Role in the Fate of the World, she highlighted the role of the media in the Rwandan Genocide.
Joseph Kimenyi, a Rwandan New Zealander, will be hosting Michela and Maria on Zoom in our Auckland studio at the Trades Hall and local Congolese-New Zealander activist, Red Tsounga, with a background in Conflict and Terrorism Studies from the University of Auckland will offer a commentary.
Trades Hall
Grey Lynn, AUK
New Zealand