“I remember vividly the time when some Ugandans were calling us names and assaulting us,” one of his childhood friends is quoted. “We were living in quarters with forty kids in each one, and he organized ours to fight against them. They were bigger than he was, but he was always saying: ‘We can’t give in to those guys. We can’t let these guys call us whatever they want. We can’t be submissive.’”

In 1976, (when Paul was midway through secondary school) Fred suddenly disappeared. Both young men had become restless as they searched for a way to channel their inchoate anger and Paul suspected Fred had embraced some kind of clandestine mission, perhaps in opposition to Idi Amin. This disappearance led Paul to wonder whether the wider world might have some place in it for him as well.

Kagame was later to graduate from Old Kampala Secondary School.

The author quotes Kagame: I started feeling, in my thinking and whole being, very rebellious. I wanted to rebel against everything in life. I felt some kind of undefined anger. There was something I wanted to overcome, but I didn’t know what it was. You were always reminded in one way or another that you didn’t belong here (Uganda); that you weren’t supposed to be there.

You have no place that you can call yours. You have no right to speak, so you keep quiet. Everything reminds you that you are not where you belong. It had almost become normal, but nothing anyone could get used to.

One of the major slights Kagame suffered was at the flight school in the town of Soroti in eastern Uganda. In 77, the (now defunct) East African Airlines placed an advertisement in Ugandan newspapers; the airline needed new pilots and was offering to train ten qualified young men at the flight school.

Kagame, writes Kinzer, had been fascinated by aviation since childhood and he jumped at the chance; he took the entrance exam with more than a hundred other applicants and when the results were posted, he was thrilled to see he was one of the ten successful candidates.