President

stepping down as president of South Africa and returning to live at his birthplace in Transkei. However, his retirement is short-lived and in December he is appointed by the UN to lead talks aimed at ending a six-year old civil war in the African state of Burundi.

South Africa has the highest number of HIV infections in the world, with about 4.7 million people, or one in nine of the population, carrying the virus. However, the government refuses to support the widespread use of retroviral drugs to treat the epidemic and suggests that poverty may be the real cause of AIDS.

Few nations that have made a transition to democracy have emerged with as solid a political system as South Africa's.

South Africa has many problems, such as desperate poverty and terrifying crime. But its suffering would have been infinitely greater absent the moral authority and democratic, inclusive spirit that made Mr. Mandela a giant as leader of the liberation movement and as President.

As a leader of the liberation movement who spent 27 years in prison, he could speak for South Africa's blacks. His authority allowed him to bully F. W. de Klerk, the last apartheid President, into taking A.N.C. demands seriously. He did not have to placate the more destructive factions in the A.N.C. After the murder of the beloved Communist leader Chris Hani in 1993, Mr. Mandela's calming speeches averted widespread violence. His conversion to market economics broke the taboo on such views inside the A.N.C., which had favored nationalizations.