When I began visiting Rwanda, in 1995, a year after the genocide, the country was still pretty well annihilated: blood-sodden and pillaged, with bands of orphans roaming the hills and women who’d been raped squatting in the ruins, its humanity betrayed, its infrastructure trashed, its economy gutted, its government improvised, a garrison state with soldiers everywhere, its court system vitiated, its prisons crammed with murderers, with more murderers still at liberty—hunting survivors and being hunted in turn by revenge killers—and with the routed army and militias of the genocide and a million and a half of their followers camped on the borders, succored by the United Nations refugee agency, and vowing to return and finish the job. In the course of a hundred days, beginning on April 6, 1994, nearly a million people from the Tutsi minority had been massacred in the name of an ideology known as Hutu Power, and, between the memory of the slaughter and the fear that it would resume, Rwanda often felt like an impossible country. Nowadays, when Rwandans look back on the early years of aftermath, they say, “In the beginning.”

On the fifteenth anniversary of the genocide, Rwanda is one of the safest and the most orderly countries in Africa. Since 1994, per-capita gross domestic product has nearly tripled, even as the population has increased by nearly twenty-five per cent, to more than ten million. There is national health insurance, and a steadily improving education system. Tourism is a boom industry and a strong draw for foreign capital investment. In Kigali, the capital, whisk-broom-wielding women in frocks and gloves sweep the streets at dawn. Plastic bags are outlawed, to keep litter under control and to protect the environment. Broadband Internet service is widespread in the cities, and networks are being extended into the countryside. Cell phones work nearly everywhere. Traffic police enforce speed limits and the mandatory use of seat belts and motorbike helmets. Government officials are required to be at their desks by seven in the morning. It is the only government on earth in which the majority of parliamentarians are women. Soldiers are almost nowhere to be seen. Kigali is now home to nearly a million people—roughly double the number ten years ago—and there is incessant construction of new homes, office blocks, medical facilities, shopping centers, hotels, schools, transport depots, foreign embassies, and roads. A billboard used to stand beside one of the main traffic circles, riddled by machine-gun fire and advertising Guinness stout with the slogan “The Power of Love”; today, a new billboard across the street says, “Pay Taxes—Build Rwanda—Be Proud.” Most of the prisoners accused or convicted of genocide have been released. The death penalty has been abolished. And Rwanda is the only nation where hundreds of thousands of people who took part in mass murder live intermingled at every level of society with the families of their victims.

“So far, so good,” Rwanda’s President, Paul Kagame, told me. Kagame, who is fifty-one, and is so thin that in official photographs with visiting dignitaries it often looks as if his guests had been posed with a cardboard cutout of him, led the rebel force—the Rwandan Patriotic Front—that stopped the genocide. He has presided over Rwanda’s destiny ever since, and he has come to be recognized, by his adversaries and his admirers alike, as one of the most formidable political figures of our age. “Fifteen years,” he said. “It sounds like a pretty long time. But if you look at it, and the value of the whole country—maybe where the country has moved to and where it should be—it becomes a very small thing.”

Kagame, who is commonly described as authoritarian even in the Rwandan press, was elected in 2003 with more than ninety-five per cent of the vote, after running effectively unopposed. But he told me that if he cannot build the national institutions that allow him to retire and preside over a peaceful transfer of power by 2017, when the Constitution requires that he step aside, then “It’s a failure.”

In the meantime, it maddens Kagame when Western observers assess Rwanda by how far it still falls short, rather than by how far it has already come. His attitude is: You’re telling me? “I wish there were a way of winding time and making it run faster,” he said. “I would do it.” In his view, the West is in no position to scold Rwanda, where the legacy of colonialism led directly to the genocide, and where some Western powers (notably France and the Vatican) supported the génocidaires before, during, and after the killing, while the rest did nothing to stop it. Like most of his original comrades in the R.P.F., Kagame grew up in exile, in Uganda, as a refugee from earlier anti-Tutsi pogroms in Rwanda, and he speaks with contempt of critics of his human-rights record who had accepted for decades the ethnic apartheid of his childhood as a legitimate form of majority rule.

“The first time I came to my country was in 1977,” he said. “I was still very young, and I went to some of my relatives who have since been killed in the genocide.” In Kagame’s youth, Rwanda existed for him only through the memory of his elders and the rumors of fellow-exiles—he was four when his family fled, in 1961—and at the age of nineteen he had slipped back in for that first visit to form his own impression. “Even at that age, I would see the oppression,” he said, and went on, “I could see the panic, the sense of frustration and desperation with the people I was visiting. . . . I was just a mere student, you know, just finished secondary school—and this is my aunt, this is my uncle. But every day they were being policed to know who visits them, to know whom they have written a letter to, to know who has written to them. And it’s, like, on the one hand they were happy to see me, on the other they wanted me away, they wanted me to leave them alone, because if they discovered that I had come from a refugee camp in Uganda they could easily perish.”

I had met Kagame five times between 1995 and 2000; on each occasion, the interview ran for hours, and he often spoke of growing up in exile, and how his experience of exclusion had led him, as a young man, to take up armed struggle. But when he talked of being Tutsi it was always as an identity that had been held against him, never as an affirmative declaration of belonging. And, when he came to power in Rwanda, the fact that he was Tutsi was still held against him. It branded him as a minority, and, to those who persisted in the belief that in Rwanda all politics must be tribal, that made him illegitimate. Kagame did not want to be perceived as the Tutsi President; he wanted to be accepted as the Rwandan President.

Emmanuel Ndahiro, one of Kagame’s closest advisers, who is now his intelligence chief, told me how encouraged he was by Barack Obama’s election. “Obama represents ideas and thinking, he doesn’t represent the blacks,” Ndahiro said, and asked, “So why can’t a Tutsi be a President where the majority are Hutus?” The genocide made Kagame’s challenge harder than ever, and also made it more essential that he succeed. So when Kagame spoke of the terror that his aunt and uncle had accepted as normal, I wondered if he could be sure that Hutus in the countryside didn’t feel oppressed, in turn, in post-genocide Rwanda.