Kagame is not the only African leader who is both impressive and repressive, though he may be the most impressive and among the most repressive. Yoweri Museveni in Uganda has stabilized his country and paved a lot of roads in his 27 years in office, while harassing journalists and opposition members. Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, who ruled for 21 years and died last summer, built Ethiopia’s booming economy but also squashed all dissent. Isaias Afewerki, Eritrea’s president, was a charming and progressive leader at one point in his career, but he has since shunned Western aid, locked up dissidents in underground shipping containers and turned his country into the North Korea of Africa. Significantly, all these men were rebel leaders who fought their way up from the trenches to the presidential suite. Perhaps there is something in the rebel experience — the fierce discipline or uncompromising vision — that helps explain why former rebels are so good at organization and administration but horrible at democracy. “These guys never, ever open up,” says John Prendergast, a founder of the Enough Project, a nonprofit anti-genocide group. “They just fear it.”

Many of the diplomats and analysts I talked to weren’t entirely bothered by Kagame’s authoritarian streak. Some even told me — and maybe this has something to do with the low expectations for Africa — that this is exactly what the continent needs: more Kagames, more highly skilled strongmen who can turn around messy, conflict-prone societies and get medicine in the hospitals and police officers on the street and plastic bags out of the trees. Liberties aren’t so important in these places, the argument goes, because who can enjoy freedom of speech or freedom of the press when everyone is killing one another? A premium is put on preserving stability and minimizing physical suffering, saving lives from malaria, from hunger, from preventable, poverty-driven diseases that are endemic across Africa.

But donor nations like the United States have drawn a line at Kagame’s involvement in Congo, because of the scale of bloodshed there. Last year, United Nations investigators revealed that Kagame’s troops crossed into Congo to fight side by side with a notorious rebel group, the M23, which has murdered civilians and gang-raped women, wreaking destruction on a swath of the eastern part of that country. Congo may be one of the world’s biggest tragedies, a country blessed with just about every natural resource imaginable — diamonds, copper, gold, oil, water, fertile land — but plagued by a series of interlocking wars that have killed millions of people. A U.N. report from 2002 accused Kagame’s army of plundering minerals from Congo and exporting them through Rwanda, at a staggering profit, supposedly with the help of one of the most infamous arms traders, Viktor Bout.

Kagame has always denied any wrongdoing in Congo and strenuously rejected the claim that his government ordered troops into that nation last year, but the United States promptly cut $200,000 in military aid to Rwanda, a token amount, for sure, but a damning signal nonetheless. Several other Western nations then cut or suspended their aid. It was the first time Kagame had ever lost a major public-relations battle, which is one reason I suspect he agreed to meet me, after years of turning down my requests for an interview; perhaps he felt it was time to engage in some image restoration.

When I brought up Congo, he nodded thoughtfully, knowing where the conversation was headed. He walked me through the complicated recent history between the two countries, starting in the early 1990s, when the Congolese government teamed up with Rwanda’s Hutu-led government to try to beat back Kagame’s rebel force. After Kagame routed the genocidal Hutu army, many of the militia leaders and army officers who orchestrated the genocide fled into Congo and continued to attack Rwanda from refugee camps just inside the Congo border. Believing that Congo’s government (at the time called Zaire) was harboring the Hutu militants, Kagame invaded Congo in 1996, and the violence has continued to this day. In late August, tensions were mounting between the two countries again after mortar shells were fired from Congo into Rwanda.

One issue historically has been that the Tutsi-dominated Rwandan Army has been secretly supporting various Congolese forces to carve out a Tutsi-controlled buffer zone along the border, which for decades has been a porous membrane for the flow of people, animals and goods between Rwanda and Congo. Kagame told me that many Rwandan Tutsis fear that their Tutsi brethren inside Congo could be massacred if Rwanda does not protect them. He acknowledged that some Rwandan churches have been sending money to Congolese rebels, as part of a Tutsi self-protection campaign. But Kagame’s critics say that is just a flimsy rationale for interfering in a country with glittering spoils that are easy to grab.

The president also admitted — and this was the first time I was aware of him saying it — that some Rwandan soldiers were indeed fighting inside Congo, but he insisted they were deserters. “At one time, we even had some of our soldiers escape, and they just go,” Kagame said. It was an almost-clever way to explain why Rwandan troops had been spotted inside Congo, but it didn’t make much sense. In a place as locked down as Rwanda, how could government soldiers “just go” anywhere without someone at the top ordering it or willingly looking the other way? After I questioned Kagame about this, he adamantly defended himself. “Are you really serious?” he asked. “Why has the United States, with all its might, failed to shut off the border with Mexico for the drugs and everything else that crosses? Is it because the United States is not trying? This thing has its own complexity.”

The sun was now starting to slant through the gaps in the curtains, and Kagame’s face began to show the strain of sleeping only four or five hours a night. His answers were getting shorter, his pauses longer. As my time with him wound down, Kagame turned almost melancholy. He rose slowly from his chair, smoothed out his slacks and got ready to say goodbye. “I have all these names associated with me,” he said, “some of which I accept, others which are not fair.” Before I left, he told me, almost in a whisper: “God created me in a very strange way.”