Mbeki as AIDS Dissenter.

Congratulations on your article "South Africa's Lonely Rebel" (World Affairs, March 4). It is time that African leaders were exposed for who they really are. Thabo Mbeki spends too much time chasing a dream instead of attending to important matters like finding a solution to the AIDS crisis, fighting crime and other issues that urgently need his attention. Our lives are in this man's hands, and since he cannot even get the fundamentals within the country right, I for one do not feel very safe. The implications of a disaster in South Africa, similar to the one in Zimbabwe, are too terrible to contemplate. We need more articles like this one covering leaders of all the African states.

Pen Gorringe

Centurion, South Africa

Thabo Mbeki is an honest man who is passionately committed to the development of Africa. It would be a tragedy if his critics succeeded in destroying his presidency. AIDS is indeed a human disaster, but it is not southern Africa's only problem. In the real world, government policies always involve trade-offs. As president, Mbeki has the task of assessing the overall strategic impact of conflicting demands on the government's limited resources. He cannot afford the quasi-religious devotion to the single issue of free antiretroviral drugs that motivates the Treatment Action Campaign. Its success in the fight against drug companies has drawn political opportunists into an alliance with it that threatens to subordinate the overall welfare of Africans to goals that are narrower and, in some cases, selfish.

Ewald J. H. Wessels

Cape Town, South Africa

While I agree with Tom Masland's assessment that Thabo Mbeki's positions on AIDS have done serious damage to both his own and South Africa's reputations (not to mention the millions of South Africans having to deal, personally, with HIV/ AIDS), I found his depiction of Mbeki as an isolated and alienated man at war with the world and his own comrades to be overstated and superficial. While I am flattered to be called "brilliant," I fear Masland has overused (and sometimes ill used) my work to buttress his slender argument that Mbeki's position on AIDS has its roots in the fact that he was a child of the liberation movement who "couldn't follow his own star." The roots of Mbeki's AIDS dissidence are far more complex than Masland allows: they range from a valid abhorrence of the killing profiteering of "Big Pharma," to Mbeki's need to be a prophet in the wilderness; and from a reading of race politics that sees the Western world as using AIDS to pathologize African male sexuality, to a sense of paralysis and denial in the ruling ANC. This last phenomenon is a result of the fact that, at the very moment it has ...