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consumed with the thinking of a small group of dissident scientists
who argued that H.I.V. was not the cause of AIDS, his biographers say.

As president he wielded enormous power, and those who disagreed with
him said they feared they would be sidelined if they spoke out. Even
Nelson Mandela, the revered former president, was not immune from
opprobrium.

In a column in The Sunday Times of Johannesburg on Oct. 19, Ngoako
Ramatlhodi, a senior party member now running the party's 2009
election campaign, recounted how Mr. Mandela, known affectionately as
Madiba, was humiliated during a 2002 A.N.C. meeting after he made a
rare appearance to question the party's stance on AIDS.

Mr. Ramatlhodi described speakers competing to show greater loyalty to
Mr. Mbeki by verbally attacking Mr. Mandela as Mr. Mbeki looked on
silently. "After his vicious mauling, Madiba looked twice his age, old
and ashen," Mr. Ramatlhodi wrote.

Mr. Ramatlhodi himself acknowledged in a recent interview that in 2001
he sent a 22-page letter, drafted by Mr. Mbeki's office, to another of
Mr. Mbeki's most credible critics, Prof. Malegapuru Makgoba, an
immunologist who was one of South Africa's leading scientists. The
letter accused Professor Makgoba of defending Western science and its
racist ideas about Africans at the expense of Mr. Mbeki.

In 2000 Mr. Mbeki had provided Professor Makgoba with two bound
volumes containing 1,500 pages of documents written by AIDS
denialists. After reading them, Professor Makgoba said in an interview
that he wrote back to warn Mr. Mbeki that if he adopted the
denialists' ideas, South Africa would "become the laughingstock, if
not the pariah, of the world again."

But Mr. Mbeki indicated last year to one of his biographers, Mark
Gevisser, that his views on AIDS were essentially unchanged, pointing
the writer to a document that, he said, was drafted by A.N.C. leaders
and accurately reflected his position.

The document's authors conceded that H.I.V. might be one cause of AIDS
but contended that there were many others, like other diseases and
malnutrition.

The document maintained that antiretrovirals were toxic. And it
suggested that powerful vested interests =97 drug companies,
governments, scientists =97 pushed the consensus view of AIDS in a quest
for money and power, while peddling centuries-old white racist beliefs
that depicted Africans as sexually rapacious.

"Yes, we are sex crazy!" the document's authors bitterly exclaimed.
"Yes, we are diseased! Yes, we spread the deadly H.I. virus through
our uncontrolled heterosexual sex!"

In 2002, after a prolonged outcry over Mr. Mbeki's comments about AIDS
and the government's policies, Mr. Mbeki agreed to requests from
within his party to withdraw from the public debate. That same year,
the Constitutional Court ruled that the government had to provide
antiretroviral drugs to prevent the infection of newborns. And in
2003, the cabinet announced plans to go forward with an antiretroviral
treatment program.

"We did an enormous amount of good in the early days in South Africa,
not because of the Health Ministry, but in spite of the Health
Ministry," said Randall L. Tobias, who was appointed by President Bush
in 2003 to lead the United States' $15 billion global AIDS
undertaking.

In the same years, former President Clinton and his foundation were
also deeply involved in helping South Africa get a treatment program
going. Mr. Clinton attended Mr. Mandela's 85th birthday celebration in
Johannesburg in 2003. During the dinner, he and Mr. Mbeki slipped away
to talk about AIDS, Mr. Clinton recalled in a recent interview.

Mr. Clinton said he told Mr. Mbeki how antiretroviral treatment had
reduced the AIDS mortality rate in the United States and reminded him,
"I'm your friend and I haven't joined in the public condemnation."
That evening, when Mr. Clinton offered to send in a team of experts to
help the country put together a national treatment plan, Mr. Mbeki
took him up on it.

The Clinton Foundation helped devise a plan and mobilized 20 people to
travel to South Africa in 2004 to help carry it out. But the South
African government never invited them, Mr. Clinton said. So the
foundation, which had projects all over Africa, was to have none in
South Africa.

Changes since Mr. Mbeki's fall from power have prompted many to hope
for forceful South African political leadership on AIDS. Mr. Mbeki's
rival and successor as head of the party, Jacob Zuma, who is expected
to become president after next year's election, himself made a
famously questionable remark about AIDS.

In his 2006 rape trial, in which he was acquitted of sexually
assaulting a family friend, he testified that he sought to reduce his
chances of being infected with H.I.V. by taking a shower after sex.
Nonetheless, he seems to have more conventional views on the pandemic.

"Who would have thought Jacob Zuma would be better than Mbeki, but he
is," said Richard C. Holbrooke, the former ambassador to the United
Nations in the Clinton administration who heads a coalition of
businesses fighting AIDS. "The tragedy of Thabo Mbeki is that he's a
smart man who could have been an international statesman on this
issue. To this day, you wonder what got into him."

For South Africans who watched the dying and were powerless to stop
it, the grief is still raw. Zackie Achmat, the country's most
prominent advocate for people with AIDS, became sick during the almost
five years he refused to take antiretrovirals until they were made
widely available. He cast Mr. Mbeki as the leading man in this African
tragedy.

"He is like Macbeth," Mr. Achmat said. "It's easier to walk through
the blood than to turn back and admit you made a mistake."