Aids epidemic is Mbeki’s legacy to South Africa

As Thabo Mbeki's dying presidency disintegrated into farce this week, South Africans expressed their shock at the way he has been treated by the African National Congress, the party he joined as a teenager. But the outgoing president must not be allowed to live down the stark fact he is to blame for something much, much worse than the current chaos within the upper ranks of the ANC.

For Thabo Mbeki is ultimately responsible for the deaths of many of the 1,100 South Africans who are dying from Aids every day. A Balkan warlord charged with one-tenth of the number of deaths Mbeki is responsible for would face trial at The Hague.

Walk into a government building in many African countries and you will find baskets of condoms, left to be taken for free. Advertising billboards advise you how to protect yourself

from the virus, and promote the twin virtues of chastity and latex. In several countries, Aids is the issue confronting the government.

But no such urgency has been apparent in South Africa, where the government has seemed, at best, ambivalent about the epidemic that has erupted on its watch.

In After the Party, his fascinating memoir of a white ANC member's loss of faith in the new South Africa, Andrew Feinstein advances an intriguing theory about Mbeki's intellectual development. As the son of Govan Mbeki, the jailed ANC and communist activist, young Thabo was sent into exile in Britain as a teenager to be groomed as a future South African leader.

A precocious boy, Thabo took to wearing tweed jackets and smoking a pipe, and believed he was destined for the dreamy quads or courts of Oxbridge. But both the ancient universities turned him down, and Thabo had to make do with red brick, left-wing Sussex, which he thought beneath him, and where his tweedy image struck the wrong note in the 1960s. Ever since that