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 assumed its rightful place at the helm of a democracy it struggled for decades to bring about, it is presented with a dying populace, and a plague to which there are no easy answers. Mark Gevisser Johannesburg, South Africa The writer is at work on a biography of President Mbeki.

Congratulations on your story and on the fact that you have refused to be confused by the smoke-and-mirrors reply of Minister Essop Pahad. For those of us living in South Africa, the reality is that in eight short years we have regressed from a developed nation to a Third World kleptocracy. Many of us also fear that we are heading the same way as our northern neighbor Zimbabwe. Has Africa a future? Certainly, but not under the leadership of the likes of Robert Mugabe and Mbeki. Lt. Col. John Howell Hughes (Ret.) Hilton, South Africa

You wonder why Mbeki is “willing to wreck his presidency over AIDS” but offer no plausible answer. Perhaps he understands that neither expensive, unreliable HIV tests nor dubious chemical treatments offer much advantage to a population suffering and dying from the environmental consequences of poverty–fever, diarrhea, weight loss, TB–all nowadays labeled “AIDS,” even in the absence of an HIV test. These conditions were examined in detail in the interim report of the Presidential AIDS Advisory Panel published in April 2001. Maybe it’s time to draw upon more diverse sources than “AIDS experts” whose predictions have been repeatedly wrong. Meanwhile, the counterpredictions and criticisms offered by scientists whom you brand a “tiny scientific minority” can be verified. There are many historical precedents of errors and lack of second thoughts among scientists. HIV/AIDS follows in that long tradition. Christian Fiala, M.D. Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology General Public Hospital Korneuburg, Austria

If former president Mandela is “the white man’s favorite politician,” then President Mbeki must be the white man’s favorite assassin! The difference between an assassin’s bullet and AIDS is that the latter is a more painful, miserable way to die and much more painful to watch. Nothing white South Africa has done in the last 150 years could compare with or decimate black South Africa like AIDS. I’m appalled by such stupidity. People are dying. And it is tragic that in one of the more developed nations in Africa, people should be forced to die of presidential ignorance. Majella Farfan Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago