Few leaders have earned the respect President Julius Nyerere did. Even fewer have continued to inspire admiration after they left office.

Dr. Henry Kissinger, an arrogant intellectual, acknowledged Nyerere's brilliance and was even outwitted by him during the Rhodesian crisis, as documented by the author (see Appendix IV). He also got a potent "dose of African nationalism," as David Ottaway wrote in "The Washington Post," when he met President Nyerere in Tanzania in 1976 to discuss the Rhodesian crisis. They differed on how to resolve it, prompting reporters to ask Nyerere if he thought Kissinger's mission to Africa was a failure. As David Ottaway who covered the event wrote in "The Washington Post": "Nyerere responded professorially by saying 'A mission of clarity is not a mission of failure.'" Kissinger, a former professor at Harvard, got a good lecture on African nationalism and the Rhodesian crisis from Nyerere, a man of immense intellect Africa will always be proud of. He was indeed an African colossus who did bestride this narrow world, as Kenyan Professor Ali Mazrui put it in his moving tribute to one of the giants of this century.

Nyerere spoke for Africa, and the world listened. He also represented the entire Third World in negotiations with the industrialized nations when he served as chairman of the South Commission after he retired as president of Tanzania. And he died a leader, one of the best the world, not just Africa, has ever produced. He was, simply put, Africa's best president. And Godfrey Mwakikagile, an African intellectual himself, has done justice to him by writing this book, immensely rich in detail, probably the best ever written about Nyerere.

The best way to honor Nyerere is to emulate his devotion, humility and simplicity. As "Newsweek" said when he died: "The world has lost a man of principle."

Dr. Julius Nyerere is gone, but he is still with us in terms of inspiration and the ideals he taught. A world leader of unparallelled commitment, especially of the Third World, he will be missed by millions round the globe.

He was also an inspiring orator with a razor-sharp intellect who was given a standing ovation for his incisive analysis and oratorical skills when he addressed the British Parliament in the seventies. A staunch Pan-Africanist, and a selfless statesman par excellence, he stood tall on the same level with Dr. Kwame Nkrumah but exercised far greater influence than Nkrumah after Nkrumah was overthrown in 1966. On the intellectual plane, only Leopold Sedar Senghor, president of Senegal, came a distant second to him among African leaders.

It has been said that intellectuals have a weakness for fellow intellectuals, as Kenyan Professor Ali Mazrui once wrote. Nyerere was one such intellectual. He enjoyed immense respect and profound admiration among Western intelectuals. Having attended school in Britain at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, he was even described as a Western intellectual. He was also taught in the Western intellectual tradition by the British in colonial Tanganyika.

Yet, he was more than a "Western" intellectual, if one at all. He was a world intellectual who was highly admired and respected by millions of people around the world, not only for his superb intellect but his exemplary leadership.

Befitting his title Mwalimu, he was also described as the greatest teacher of our time, as former Biafran leader Odumegwu Ojukwu said, quoted by the BBC, following Nyerere's death. But that was probably an understatement, although that's not what Ojukwu meant. Mwalimu Nyerere was one of the greatest teachers of all times, embraced by people of all races and nationalities. And he taught by example.

He was indeed a legend in his own time, and will remain one for generations. Godfrey Mwakikagile has written a book which puts this legend in proper perspective. It is also a book that has earned the author a place among his readers as a respected authority on Nyerere. And his work is not compromised by bias despite his strong admiration for Mwalimu Nyerere as a leader and as an intellectual. He has written a book which will be of great interest to many people including scholars, especially those interested in Tanzania's foreign policy under Nyerere.

Dr. Nyerere did, indeed, deserve the title, "The Conscience of Africa," if not of the world.

In his much praised work "Africa and the West" (reviewed in "West Africa" Magazine, January 21, 2002), Tanzanian journalist-turned-academic Godfrey Mwakikagile, who has demonstrated his thorough grasp of the forces emanating inside and outside Africa towards the continent's progress, said that to understand Africa, there is the need to psychoanalyse the African personality in relation to the world. For this reason, "Africa and the West" evokes an enlightened and erudite page-turner, a book that stands out in this year's (2002) publications.

And it is unsurprising that Mwakikagile's latest book, "Nyerere and Africa: End of an Era" (reviewed in "West Africa" Magazine, November 25, 2002) invokes its predecessor - "Africa and the West" - demonstrating how Julius Nyerere struggled painstakingly to show the true African personality in his drive to develop Tanzania and Africa.

As has happened in the rest of Africa, Nyerere had to swim through complicated forces shaping Africa's progress. Some he understood and could handle. Some he misunderstood and could not handle; some blinding him to both the Tanzanian and the African reality. In the end, he admitted to some failures but generally he did well compared to other African leaders.

Writing about a leader of Julius Nyerere's (1922 - 1999) stature is no small matter, and looking through him to read his mind about what motivated him to devote his life to the people of Tanzania and Africa, sometimes at great discomfort, is a giant enterprise. The reason is not only Nyerere's long-running rule, which spanned a period of major changes in Africa's political landscape - from the one-party era to the phenomenal burst of military coups to rebel-cum-civil wars and the nourishing of democracy, as well as an international system that was polarised between the United States and the Soviet Union and undermined his development drives.

That Tanzania had Nyerere as captain of its affairs might have saved it from experiencing the bloody events that visited other African states with less astute and balanced leaders. But even with such astuteness, Nyerere was sometimes drawn into the turbulent affairs of other African countries - such as his dabbling in the complicated Nigerian civil war and his invasion of Uganda to overthrow President Idi Amin.

In this context, Mwakikagile, who worked with the Tanzanian mass circulation "Daily News," examines Nyerere's policy initiatives and achievements in wrestling with forces that he confronted throughout his rule. Ernest Hemingway once wrote that "the most complicated subject that I know, since I am a man, is man's life." Nyerere was in many ways a complicated man. The picture of him ranting anti-colonial slogans and simultaneously joining Presidents Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Milton Obote of Uganda to invite ex-colonial master Great Britain to help put down a mutiny by their respective militaries on January 20, 1964, is one example.

However, Nyerere was at home when dealing with African forces such as when he used the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) to "ask for help from fellow Africans to replace British soldiers as soon as possible. Soon thereafter, Nigeria under President Nnamdi Azikiwe sent troops to Tanganyika to replace the British. Kenya and Uganda continued to rely on British assistance until the situation returned to normal."

In these attempts, we read about other complex African events that revolved around Nyerere. While Nyerere was able to handle some and influence others, including his skill in creating the union of Tanganyika and Zanzibar, we read about his acclaimed vision limitations - his inability to create an East African federation as a precursor to faster regional, and by extension, African development.

Writes the author, "As Julius Nyerere said many years after he stepped down as president of Tanzania, his greatest failure was that although he managed to unite Tanganyika and Zanzibar to create Tanzania in 1964, he was never able to persuade the leaders of neighbouring countries to form a larger federation, a move he believed would have made the region a powerhouse."

What shaped Nyerere, born on April 13, 1922, in the village of Butiama near the town of Musoma in Mara Region on the southeastern shores of Lake Victoria in northern Tanganyika, now Tanzania, is explained in chapter three. Here Nyerere emerges as one who displayed high intelligence as a teenager, flowering as a thinker in his adult life, and a man who left aside the comfort of his royal birth to plunge into the turbulent affairs of Tanzanian and African politics.

Mwakikagile writes, "He was of peasant origin, but from a ruling family. He was the son of a chief of the Zanaki tribe, one of the smallest in Tanzania and in Africa with a total population of about 40,000. An excellent student, he was also known for his extraordinary brilliance and as an original thinker throughout his life and came to be acknowledged as a philosopher-king. Yet he also won accolades for his humility and simplicity and as one of the the most humble leaders the world has ever produced. He was Julius Nyerere." Nyerere had the welfare of Africans at heart, culminating in his formation of the non-political Tanganyika African Welfare Association at Makerere University College, a process that was to open the floodgate into larger national and continental politics.

Like other progressive African leaders such as Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah, who influenced Nyerere greatly, Nyerere serves as both an example and a warning to Tanzanian and African development. What Mwakikagile has done is to write a book that is food for Africa's progress - for progress is informed by the quality of a state's leaders. This is more so in a continent crying for role models and publications of Africans of distinction to inspire development.