Rwanda

Wednesday

Michela Wrong

A late Congolese ruler with a new following

At the exit of the National Museum in Kinshasa, capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), is a whiteboard for visitors to leave their comments. On that whiteboard, full of underlinings and exclamation marks, are messages like this: “Thank you for your life.” “Thank you for our national unity.” “You left behind a glorious historical legacy. We plan to follow in your footsteps.” A giant photograph of the man the messages refer to hangs in the museum’s main hall as part of its new exhibition, a man in dark glasses and leopard-skin toque, smiling down at his people. More than 28 years after fleeing into exile, Mobutu Sese Seko, once known as “The Leopard” and “The Great Helmsman,” is back in the limelight in the DRC.

Thursday

Sarah Beth Spraggins

Trump’s peace process pageantry

The US Institute of Peace was taken over by DoGE in January and now appears to have undergone a makeover both inside and out. Its new name is emblazoned on the front: “Donald J. Trump Institute of Peace.” The President loves deals and good branding, perhaps as much as he professes to love peace. On Thursday, in the high-ceilinged atrium of the building, he hosted a celebration of a peace agreement between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. The actual peace agreement in question was signed over the summer with shaky results. Nevertheless, leaders from several East African nations, as well as the UAE and Qatar turned up to bear witness to the ceremonial acknowledgement of the agreement.

donald trump peace

Tuesday

Cockburn

Did Kamala Harris ‘stun’ at the Met Gala?

Met Gala turns @TheDemocrats into @PopCrave Celebrities from the music industry, the NFL and Hollywood joined Kamala Harris at the annual Met Gala fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. In an embarrassing tweet emulating viral celebrity accounts such as @PopCrave, @TheDemocrats (yes, the official social media account for the entire Democratic party) wrote, “Kamala Harris stuns at the Met Gala.” The defeated presidential candidate wore a black and white dress in a possible homage to Cruella de Vil. Despite the online slavering at DNC HQ, Emily Smith notes elsewhere in The Spectator that Harris’s audience might have been on the other coast.

kamala harris met gala

Friday

Christopher Sandford

Bill Clinton’s latest memoir sees him at his chirpiest — and most combative

In February 1974, the British prime minister Edward Heath, then facing one of his country’s cyclical economic crises, called a snap general election. The result was close; Heath’s Conservative Party won the popular vote but secured fewer parliamentary seats than the Labour opposition. After power-sharing discussions broke down, Heath resigned from office. A fifty-seven-year-old bachelor without a London home of his own, he lodged for the next several months at a small Westminster flat owned by his political secretary Timothy Kitson. The man who had served as his nation’s head of government for the previous four years was left with a typist, a single daytime detective and a part-time driver at his disposal.

Clinton

Thursday

Amy Rose Everett

Rwanda to Uganda: a cross-border quest

The shelves of my father’s study-cum-Tottenham Hotspur shrine, stacked with leatherbound match day programs and soccer players’ autobiographies, belie his life’s true obsession: gorillas. The clues are there, though. A small bronze statue of a silverback makes a heavy bookend. A wooden walking stick, its handle carved into the shape of an ape, is propped in the corner. Remove them — and our hazy memories of tracking black, fluffy balls of muscle through lush African forest could be chalked up to a fever dream. But we really did it. After a decade of idle talk, Dad and I devised our mission: we’d research gorillas in Rwanda and realize his life goal of tracking them in Uganda.