CYANIKA, RWANDA—The first thing travelers must do when they cross the border from Uganda into Rwanda is to wash and sanitize their hands. The process should not surprise anyone. Rwanda is the cleanest country in Africa. Sixteen years ago, it became one of the first countries in the world to ban plastic bags. Whereas it is common across Africa and the Middle East to throw trash out car windows or drop it when walking, Rwanda is immaculate. Certainly, penalties are high for littering, but cleanliness is no longer simply coerced—it is cultural. Walking along boulevards and streets in portions of Kigali is to be in a botanical garden, with daylilies and tropical flowers planted across medians and landscaped up erosion-control retaining walls.

The country, devastated by the anti-Tutsi genocide just three decades ago, has become independent and self-sufficient. President Paul Kagame has implemented a broad program of cultural change that today pays dividends, though it has come at the expense of electoral change. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, Belgian colonial administrators embraced eugenics as a means of classifying the local population. Before the Belgian administration, the difference between Hutus and Tutsis, for example, was less genetic and more a matter of class with the possibility of social mobility between groups. Prior to the 1994 genocide, militants took Hutu supremacism to an extreme to justify their actions. Kagame seeks stability by erasing any bureaucratic distinction between Hutu and Tutsi over a generation to return Rwanda to a time when such categories did not matter. Today, Hutus serve under Tutsis in the military and vice versa. Rwandan Christians serve alongside their Muslim compatriots, and churches and mosques dot the same streets.

Rwanda’s cultural metamorphosis is also evident in economics. Just two decades ago, Rwanda ranked alongside Lebanon and behind Egypt in terms of corruption. Today, Transparency International suggests Rwanda surpasses many European states in clean governance. Alongside Botswana, Rwanda is the least corrupt country in continental Africa. This achievement is more remarkable given Rwanda’s neighbors, Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Uganda, are all among the world’s most corrupt countries. The country’s investment in clean governance and a concurrent emphasis on education paid off. Investors flock to Rwanda, and per capita income has increased by an order of magnitude since the genocide. As important, the rate of Rwanda’s transformation is increasing. What Rwanda experiences today is not unlike what Singapore experienced in the 1970s.

Rwanda, meanwhile, contributes disproportionately to regional security. Its deployment to Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, almost singlehandedly defeated the Islamic State in the gas-rich province after the failure of both Russia’s Wagner Group and a South African-led Southern African Development Community deployment. It almost singlehandedly prevented the collapse of the Central African Republic into sectarian chaos when, in December 2020, rebels marched on the capital. Today, Rwandan UN peacekeepers are the last defense against the complete South Sudanese collapse. Rwandan security consultants informally advise Benin as it faces the risk of Sahel instability bleeding southward from Niger and Burkina Faso. 

Rwanda not only acts as a modern-day Sparta but also as a modern Athens, at least in terms of trade. In Mozambique and the Central African Republic, the security Rwandans created enabled investment and trade, especially in the agricultural sector. Through it all, Rwanda has maintained a balanced policy. It has not fallen into the Chinese debt trap like Djibouti, nor has it sold its soul to Russia like Mali. Meanwhile, Kagame has doubled down on Rwanda’s domestic industry without becoming isolationist.

How ironic, then, that the State Department treats Rwanda like a pariah. At Kagame’s inauguration earlier this month, the embassy’s deputy chief of mission, in the country for less than a week, represented the United States while twenty-six African heads of state or government attended, as did senior Chinese, Russian, and European officials. The sleight was deliberate. U.S. Ambassador Eric Kneedler, a well-regarded diplomat who knows not to take a vacation that would conflict with a major political event, suddenly left the country, apparently on the orders of his superiors in the State Department like Assistant Secretary Molly Phee, if not Secretary of State Antony Blinken himself.

The question is why the Biden administration would treat Rwanda with such disdain. Consider, for example, the case of Singapore. Freedom House observed, “When Singapore achieved independence from Britain under Lee [Kuan Yew] in 1959, it was little more than a squalid backwater. By the time Lee stepped down in 1990, the city-state had become one of the four renowned ‘Little Dragons,’ along with Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong.” The difference between Singapore and its peer dragons is its diversity, with Chinese and Malays and Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, and Muslims living side-by-side.

While the State Department and human rights groups harp on Kagame’s supposed democracy deficit, they ignore that he essentially pursues the same strategy that they blessed when Lee undertook it. Indeed, the only difference was that Kagame inherited a genocide-riven wasteland rather than a mere backwater.

In 2016, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong spoke about how Singapore conquered corruption. He credited the relatively clean and functional system Singapore inherited from British colonial authorities and the investment Singaporean leaders made over time to ensure popular rejection of corruption. Juxtaposing Rwanda’s experience with Singapore’s, however, makes Rwanda’s transformation seem even more impressive. After all, while Singapore could use the British legacy as a launch pad, Kagame had only the ashes of a genocide to work with. Singapore also has better neighbors: Malaysia does not pose an existential threat to the state. Still, Hutu génocidaires train a new crop of terrorists across the border in the Democratic Republic of Congo but within sight of the Rwandan border.

Whereas the State Department celebrates Singapore, Vice President Kamala Harris even visited in 2021, it keeps its distance from Rwanda. Perhaps progressives in the State Department and USAID resent Kagame’s confidence and independence. Rwanda certainly has its issues, but agenda-riddled human rights groups often exaggerate complaints. In 2017, for example, Human Rights Watch famously reported that Rwanda had executed a number of petty thieves, only to have them appear on television weeks later very much alive. 

Those rallying around Paul Rusesabagina of “Hotel Rwanda” fame ignore his subsequent foray into terror financing and take at face value fictions about his “kidnapping” and treatment in prison, and promote a narrative that even those in the State Department acknowledge is nonsense. Despite facing genuine threats, Rwanda abolished the death penalty in 2007. Singapore, meanwhile, clocks in as the ninth-greatest purveyor of capital punishment despite being one of the world’s smallest countries.

The question for Blinken and Phee, then, should be: Why does the State Department not allow complaints about Singapore’s human rights to derail relations but allows human rights groups and its own diplomats to condescend to and demean Rwanda? Strategic value is not the reason: Singapore hosts a base, but Rwanda contributes as much, if not more.

It may be harsh, but it is hard not to escape the conclusion that the reason why the State Department treats Rwanda so poorly relative to peer countries is that it is African. At the very least, this is the conclusion that not only Rwandans but also many other Africans today whisper.

Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Image: MikeCPhoto / Shutterstock.com.