Paul Kagame

Paul Kagame was two years old when his family fled the anti-Tutsi violence of 1959 and crossed into Uganda, where he grew up in the Nshungerezi refugee camp. He joined Yoweri Museveni's guerrilla war as a young man and rose to head military intelligence in the Ugandan army, then helped found the Rwandan Patriotic Front among the exiles who had never been allowed home.

The RPF invaded in 1990. When the genocide began in April 1994 Kagame was its commander, and over the following hundred days his forces fought their way to Kigali and stopped it — while the United Nations withdrew its peacekeepers and no other power intervened. Something close to a million people had been killed. He is the man who ended it, and Rwandans who say nothing else about him say that.

What he did with the country afterwards is the second part. He took over a state with no functioning institutions, no currency reserves, two million refugees and roughly a hundred and twenty thousand people accused of genocide awaiting trial. Rwanda has since had two decades of high growth, near-universal health insurance, one of the sharpest falls in child mortality recorded anywhere, and a reputation for administrative competence and low petty corruption that is unusual in the region. Women hold more parliamentary seats than in any other country in the world. The gacaca courts processed over a million cases the formal system could never have heard. Identity cards no longer record ethnicity; the categories that organised the killing were abolished outright.

He became president in 2000 and has held the office since, and is among the most consequential African leaders of the past half century by any measure.