The Foreign Service Journal, May 2004

F O C U S M A Y 2 0 0 4 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 39 African nation after African nation insisted that the state have primary control of economic practice. On stepping down from office in 1985, Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere acknowledged that he had made a mistake in trying to force people into the col- lective farming projects known as Ujamaa Villages. Even so, a remark Nyerere made in an interview short- ly before his death in 1999 seems a useful thought to keep in mind while considering the development efforts under way in African nations today: “I must con- fess, I did not see myself as charting out something for the rest of Africa. One picks one’s way.” Always a keen observer of the continent, speaking as an elder statesman in August 1996, Nyerere was hopeful about Africa. “A new leadership is developing in Africa,” Nyerere told The New York Times . “The military phase is out.” Next door in Uganda at that time, the much younger Yoweri Museveni and his government had already been tackling the HIV/AIDS problem head-on for 10 years, campaigning to raise public awareness of the deadly dan- ger it posed with unusual frankness. The disease was a problem most African leaders were refusing to either acknowledge or face. HIV/AIDS has not vanished from Uganda, but the rate of infection has dramatically dropped. This success still sets the standard for fighting the HIV/AIDS pandemic in Africa. Ruthless regimes like today’s Equatorial Guinea run counter to African political acceptability, and even that regime feels compelled to pretend at being a multi- party democracy. The 1997 end of Mobutu Sese Seko’s kleptocratic government in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), the end of Mozambique’s 18- year civil war, and the end of apartheid in South Africa, all have to be counted great African success stories, confirming the appropriateness of Nyerere’s hopeful attitude. A process of reconciliation is now under way in the bloodstained nation of Rwanda, which witnessed a genocidal horror just a decade ago. And a two-day summit in Kigali this past February of the nine African heads of state who comprise the implementation com- mission for the NEPAD Peer Review Mechanism made striking progress.