The first time I saw Ed Stoddard’s name in my inbox, it was attached to an article already going viral for all the wrong reasons.
His June 11, 2025 piece in Daily Maverick struck me not as a dispatch from a thoughtful journalist, but as a familiar Western lament cloaked in righteous indignation.
I’ve seen this style before: a confident outsider, dipping into Rwanda’s story without context, without curiosity, and certainly without the humility that such a task demands.
His piece wasn’t just an attack on conservation—it was an attack on the very idea that an African country can govern itself firmly and still earn global respect.
This is a personal response to Ed Stoddard’s article attacking Rwanda’s conservation efforts and leadership. I write this not just to correct inaccuracies, but to challenge the assumptions, tone, and motivations underlying his piece.
This is not just a rebuttal; it is also a call for a more thoughtful and honest engagement with Rwanda’s story.
When I first read Ed Stoddard’s article, I was struck by two things: its familiarity and its condescension. Familiarity, because I have seen this kind of writing before—a Western journalist, confident in his moral superiority, reducing a complex African society into a caricature of repression and manipulation. Condescension, because once again, Rwanda is treated not as a sovereign nation with agency and purpose, but as a cautionary tale told through Western lenses.
Stoddard’s article attempts to do two things simultaneously: to diminish Rwanda’s conservation achievements and to link them to what he calls an authoritarian regime.
In doing so, he ends up exposing less about Rwanda and more about the biases that plague so much Western reporting on Africa.
Let’s talk about the rhinos.
In 2017, Rwanda reintroduced 18 black rhinos to Akagera National Park—an historic step in restoring a species extinct in the area for a decade. In 2021, 30 white rhinos were translocated to Akagera.
And in June 2025, an additional 70 white rhinos were brought in—one of the largest single white rhino translocations ever undertaken. These operations were not vanity projects. They were the result of years of planning, collaboration, and commitment by African Parks, the Rwandan government, local communities, and international partners.
What Stoddard calls a “PR stunt” is, in fact, a monumental conservation achievement.
Rwanda’s conservation achievements are not theoretical—they are visible. We’ve not only reintroduced rhinos to Akagera, we’ve revived its lion population, expanded the park’s borders, restored wetlands, and created one of the most effective anti-poaching networks on the continent.
Our Gishwati-Mukura Forest was declared a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. The Volcanoes National Park is now one of the few places where the endangered mountain gorilla population is rising, not shrinking. That’s not luck. That’s leadership. That’s investment. That’s results.
Kigali banned plastic bags before most Western cities even debated it. We’ve planted over 30 million trees through the Forest Landscape Restoration program. And we’re now building Africa’s first green city. These aren’t photo ops. They’re survival policies.
Ask anyone who lived through the land degradation of the late 1990s. Rwanda didn’t go green for applause—we went green to live. So yes, African Parks chose Rwanda—not because they were naïve, but because they were impressed.
To accuse them of “shaking hands with the devil” is not only childish—it’s dishonest. And to ridicule the translocation of 70 rhinos, one of the largest and most complex in conservation history, as mere window-dressing is to spit on the work of hundreds of rangers, veterinarians, ecologists, donors, and community members who made it happen.
That work saved a species. But somehow, to Ed Stoddard, it’s a scandal.
Rwanda has restored a park once decimated by conflict and poaching. It has created safe habitats, trained rangers, engaged communities, and proven that conservation can thrive in post-conflict settings.
The presence of rhinos, lions, and elephants in Akagera is not just about tourism—it’s about ecological restoration not just for Rwanda, but the entire world and definitely a layer of national pride.
Stoddard’s claim that Rwanda is “using conservation to greenwash its reputation” misses the point entirely.
Rwanda is not seeking an obscure journalist’s or western’s approval through rhinos.
It is reclaiming its natural heritage and building a future rooted in sustainability, and a sense of national pride. Even a toddler would understand this.
Conservation here is not a distraction from governance—it is governance. It reflects long-term thinking, policy coherence, and national vision.
But of course, no article like Stoddard’s would be complete without the familiar tropes: authoritarianism, repression, surveillance, assassinations. He throws them in casually, with little evidence, as though they are universally accepted truths.
He writes as though nuance is a luxury reserved only for Western democracies.
Yes, Rwanda has a firm government. Yes, its political space is limited. But that is not the full story. Let me be clear—Western critics need to understand this about us Rwandans: we are defensive, as is always said, because we have built this country together, through unbearable pain and collective resolve, under Paul Kagame’s leadership. Not all Rwandans like him.
And no human being can and will ever achieve that. But most of us recognize how vital his role has been.
He has been central to holding together this fragile rebirth. We take massive offense when that story is erased or reduced to tropes. Because this new Rwanda was not gifted to us—we built it with bare hands, scarred hearts, and unwavering purpose.
Rwanda emerged from a genocide that claimed over a million Tutsis in 1994. The state was shattered. Institutions were gone. Trust was obliterated. The Rwanda that Stoddard critiques is a country rebuilt from ashes.
It is a country that chose order over chaos, reconciliation over revenge, and development over division. That choice came with difficult trade-offs, but it was a choice made by Rwandans, not imposed from outside.
Critics often invoke Kagame’s electoral victories of 90% as evidence of repression. But they rarely ask why he remains popular.
Perhaps because roads are built. Clinics function. Schools exist. Women make up the majority of parliament. Corruption is low. Safety is high. Kigali is clean and efficient. These are not illusions. They are lived realities. It’s not Kagame’s burden that opponents are weak. Kagame welds so much power and so deservingly. At least he uses it for greater good.
I remember speaking to a young teacher in Nyagatare, eastern Rwanda, who told me, “I don’t know politics. But my students are fed, and I get paid. That’s enough for me.” That sentiment is not rare. It reflects a pragmatism born of history. For many Rwandans, the scars of 1994 are not abstract—they are daily reminders of what can happen when politics fails.
And then there was the hotel owner I met in Musanze in 2023—a wiry man in his late forties with a quiet pride in his work. “Before Kagame, this land was good only for hiding, sporadic terror attacks and gorilla poaching,” he told me, glancing out at the lush ridges of the Volcanoes. “Now people come from all over the world to see our gorillas. I built this place from tourist money. I pay my workers. My kids go to school.
You think I care what foreign journalists say about repression? I care about feeding my family and keeping the peace.” And those are returns of a repressive regime of Kagame.
That’s a classic irony, isn’t it?
Stoddard mocks Rwanda’s clean streets and public order, implying they are symptoms of control. But would he prefer chaos? Would he prefer corruption and dysfunction? He calls Kagame’s leadership “sinister,” yet offers no serious engagement with the alternative. What is his model? What is his plan for post-genocide reconstruction?
He criticizes the state’s security operations abroad, referencing the deaths of exiles. These are serious issues, and they deserve scrutiny. But he presents them as proof of villainy, ignoring the context.
Rwanda has been the target of armed groups operating from neighboring countries. So, Rwanda should wait until enemies trike? Why does the US or UK hunt “terrorists” on foreign lands? And we shouldn’t hunt enemies? Forget about that.
Some of the so-called dissidents he defends have been linked to terrorism, genocide denial and propagation, and destabilization campaigns. This does not excuse state abuses, but it complicates the narrative.
Stoddard quotes from Michela Wrong’s book “Do Not Disturb” as though it were gospel. Yet that book, too, has been widely criticized for its selective storytelling and reliance on discredited sources.
It paints Rwanda’s former intelligence chief, Patrick Karegeya, as a martyr.
But many Rwandans remember him differently—as a man with a legacy far from innocent. It’s a Rwandan taboo to mock the dead. But I remember my telephone conversation with him while he was in South Africa. I asked him about the dozens of criminal charges against him, links to terror attacks in Kigali and the allegations of how he had tormented countless innocent Rwandans before he forced himself into exile.
His response? “Go to hell, tell your bosses to go to hell too!” The facts were damning for him.
I haven’t talked to Kayumba Nyamwasa, but I can assure you his hands are bloodier than Karegeya’s. I don’t know why I am even talking about this lumpen. I know a lot about his mischief that I feel terrible mentioning his name. What a wasted material.
And then there is the central claim of his piece: that rhinos are safer in Rwanda than dissidents. It’s a clever line, designed to provoke outrage, and secure an activism punchline.
But it’s also deeply unfair—to the rangers who protect those rhinos, to the communities who co-exist with them, and to a country that is trying, against all odds, to move forward.
Rwanda’s conservation story is not perfect. We have challenges—poaching pressures, climate vulnerability, funding needs. Our governance, too, has shortcomings—lack of political pluralism, press freedom that needs oxygen, economic inequality. But the answer to these problems is not cynicism. It is engagement. Understanding. Partnerships. Respect.
I don’t expect Ed Stoddard to love Rwanda. But I do expect him to try to understand it. I expect him to visit, to talk to people, to question his assumptions. Well, that’s enough of courtesy and respect.
Journalism demands that. Rwanda is not a cartoon. It is a country. It is complex, evolving, wounded, and ambitious, we demand that the likes of Stoddard accord us with such a token of gratis.
If protecting rhinos earns us praise, but protecting Rwandans earns us suspicion, then perhaps the problem is not with us.
Perhaps the problem lies with those who still believe Africa must be either pitiful or villainous—never competent, never sovereign.
Stoddard is not the first to write us off. He won’t be the last. But Rwanda is not writing for his approval. We are writing our own future. And we remember.
