AN AFRICAN FOR AFRICA

By Johanna McGeary

On a continent normally consigned to the political and economic dustheap, Yoweri Museveni has amply demonstrated that he is something different. The President of Uganda, respected at home as Central Africa's intellectual compass and admired abroad as the harbinger of good news for a blighted region, has successfully resurrected his own benighted country and now fully intends to help neighboring leaders do the same for theirs. The secret? Things long deemed heretical there, like Africans taking charge of their own future, like the virtues of the free market, like a United States of Africa, like cows.

The cows are a constant touchstone for Museveni, the firm ground beneath a philosophy he believes can rescue Africa from chaos. So he often repairs to his cattle ranch in the green hills of Rwakitura where he grew up and where his father before him and his son after him tend the long-horned herds. As the cows file through the gate to the communal wateringhole, Museveni softly calls each by name. "This one is Gaju Ya Bihogo," he says. "That one is Kiremba Kya Ngabo. The gray one over there is descended from my grandfather's herd." Surveying the cattle with an expert eye, he asks his herdsman why one is limping, who is the mother of this young one. "Good cows," he says, "need good politics."

So do Africans. That is why Museveni invited himself this month to Kinshasa, capital of neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo, which was Zaire until a few months ago. He was worried that Laurent Kabila, the rebel he helped to the country's presidency, was not making quick enough progress in restoring the ruined country. The meeting had all the ceremony of a summit, but it was really an opportunity for Museveni to give his friend some discreet but blunt advice. "They must start to move here," said Museveni afterward. "People expect to see things happening. Kabila wants to help his people, so that's half the battle won. We can help with the rest."

Uganda's leader is the brains and strategist of the entire region's new thinking. His odd coupling of outsize dreams and practical solutions has transformed his own blood-soaked nation into a model of economic advancement and stability, though hardly an American-style democracy. He believes the same African-style ideology can work just as well in the troubled lands of Congo, Rwanda and Sudan. But it is far from certain that what Museveni did in Uganda can be repeated elsewhere. As Museveni's confreres take power in the region--Kabila now rules Congo, guerrilla companion Paul Kagame is the authority to be reckoned with in Rwanda, old schoolmate John Garang is gaining ground in his long struggle to topple the Islamist regime in Sudan--the question is whether they will prove to be faithful disciples of the Museveni model or just younger versions of Africa's despotic Big Men.

Museveni himself seems to have few doubts. "Now Africa can start acting together," he says. "It is the most important time since the end of colonialism." Men he calls "African patriots" have come to power with "common aims, not just past personal connections." They are alike in their antipathy to corruption, their disgust with the old ways, their outrage at how badly their countries were run. And they all seem more concerned with how to promote social, economic and political progress than their predecessors ever were. Says a senior U.S. diplomat: "In comparison to what went before, they look damn good."

If they turn out to be as effective as Museveni, they will be good for Africa. But the U.S. and Europe may not entirely like it. Museveni has thought deeply about how Africa can develop, and his view does not neatly fit the Western mold. At its most fundamental, Museveni's ideology is what he calls "Bantuphone," a term he coined loosely meaning made in Africa, not inherited from some colonial master. He wants Africans to look after their own destiny as they pursue modernization, to suit their systems to local conditions. "It's high time," he told TIME, "that white people left Africa alone and started minding their own business." Likewise Africans must "liberate themselves from themselves," divesting their lands of the postcolonial generation of malefactors and incompetents. He has given up the idea of Western salvation, says Constance Freeman, director of African Studies at Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, in favor of Africans "relying on themselves."

The most powerful instrument of persuasion of this balding, burly, bass-voiced leader is his ability to stand up and say to his fellow rulers, Look at what I've done here. In the 11 years Museveni has run Uganda, he has brought a country savaged by dictators and murderous wars back from the dead. He has implemented free markets, controlled inflation and cut the civil service. A middle class has emerged, hopeless state-owned enterprises have been privatized, agricultural productivity is soaring, roads crisscross the country. A devil for investment in local enterprise, Museveni charmed Egyptian businessmen into manufacturing muteete-grass toothpaste and urged South African moneymen to start a banana-juice factory. If prosperity has barely begun to reach the man in the street, there is strong domestic and international confidence in Uganda's economic future.

Museveni traveled a long intellectual road to that success. He had no inkling, growing up among the Ankole tribe in southwestern Uganda, he says, of the damage the British rulers of the country were doing. Born in 1944, he was named Museveni, meaning He of the Seven in honor of Ugandan soldiers who fought in the 7th battalion of the King's African Rifles during World War II. His father owned more than 50 cattle--wealth enough to send his children to school--and for 12 years the young Yoweri attended missionary schools that preached government service, not farming, as the path to success.

Then, in the heady 1960s, as a student at Tanzania's University of Dar es Salaam, Museveni plunged into the African freedom movement. He learned guerrilla tactics with the Frelimo rebels of Portuguese-ruled Mozambique. He discovered pan-Africanism and Lenin. "Lenin wrote that imperialism was the economic penetration of backward areas by advanced countries. Colonialism was the political superstructure of this," says Museveni. "The message to us was, Until you get rid of both, you'll never be free, and you'll never develop."

But living in socialist Tanzania in the '70s taught Museveni just how flawed communism was. "Lenin talked only about money going out," he says. "He didn't talk about the wages a company paid that stayed inside the country, or the money paid for power and light, or the raw materials it bought or the taxes it paid. Lenin missed this." Even more important, Museveni saw firsthand that nationalized enterprises didn't work. "Communal property was nobody's property," he says. "So nobody worked. The problem was motivation. None of these fellows had a stake." He opens his eyes wide to make sure his message has been received. "You have to base your production strategy on the selfish individual, not the altruistic minority." He compared how well his family had looked after their cows to Tanzanian mismanagement of state property.

Because he despises failure, Museveni converted to capitalism. Africa needed to create wealth, he decided, and for that, nothing beat Adam Smith. Private enterprise was quite simply the most suitable means of modernization. Yet he remains at heart a socialist who would prefer a more egalitarian system. Although he understands how the economic world works today and he wants Uganda to be part of it, he does not really admire it. Even now, he calls Uganda's capitalists "cows for the state to milk."

Armed with an economics degree, Museveni returned to Kampala in 1970 to serve in the government of Prime Minister Milton Obote, only to flee back to Tanzania when Idi Amin staged a coup a year later. He taught economics while building a guerrilla force among the exiles that eventually joined the Tanzanian army to oust the homicidal Amin in 1979. When Museveni ran for President in 1980, he was humiliated in an election he claims was fraudulent, which put the ruthless Obote back in charge. Museveni took to the bush.

There he practiced what he now calls "cleansing" violence. If rebellion was the only way to rid Uganda of its rapacious despots, he would lead one. Starting in early 1981 with 30 men and 27 stolen rifles, he entered Kampala five years later as the head of a highly motivated, highly disciplined army of more than 10,000.

In the years since, Museveni has had no compunction about supporting similar campaigns in neighboring countries. The West has generally looked the other way, despite unspoken rules forbidding meddling across Africa's delicate borders. But Museveni believes African rulers have not only the right but the duty to intervene when they see a just cause. The Ugandan leader befriended Kagame when exiled Rwandan Tutsi raised their children among Museveni's Ankole tribe and the two later fought together in the Ugandan bush. Kagame even served in Uganda's army from 1986 to 1990. When the time came to lead an invasion of Rwanda, Kagame relied on Museveni's moral and material help, including arms. While Museveni insists he "wasn't looking" for the opportunity to dislodge longtime strongman Mobutu Sese Seko from Zaire, when the chance came he joined with Kagame to mastermind the revolt. With Washington's tacit consent, he supplies weapons and training to the Sudanese guerrilla bands of Garang, who went to university with Museveni and who even sent his own troops to fight. But Museveni is not just helping his buddies: he wants quiet, friendly borders in order to shut down three guerrilla groups that continue to plague parts of northern and western Uganda.

Now there are rumors of military intervention in Burundi. Talks to arrange power sharing between warring Tutsi and Hutu factions are faltering, economic sanctions have not cooled the fighting and the violence threatens to spill over into Tanzania. Museveni told TIME that before U.S. ambassador Michael Southwick left Kampala at the end of July, he delivered a "verbal note" warning Uganda against exercising a military option in Burundi. Says Museveni: "I ignored it." The Ugandan President has also been told by Washington to keep out of Kenya, where riots are undermining the increasingly troubled regime of Daniel arap Moi, or the U.S. would "drop him like a hot potato." Though his antipathy for Moi is common knowledge, Museveni has lately bent over backward to bring Moi into the East African Cooperation, an off-again, on-again economic pact among Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania, and he seems unlikely to wreck that. But an aide to Rwanda's Kagame told TIME: "Moi will go. Perhaps not with elections."

Museveni is unabashedly no democrat, at least by U.S. standards. When at age 41 he took Kampala, he had long been disillusioned with the divisive, sectarian politics of Uganda. Instead the country needed a system that discouraged tribal rivalry. He made his National Resistance Movement the sole legal political structure.

The new leader welcomed members of the other parties into his government but banned all further party activities. He copied a system he saw Frelimo use in Mozambique, organizing the population into a hierarchy of governmental committees to which members were elected as individuals, not party members. The U.S. accepted it when Museveni called this system an indigenous democracy, even when he won the presidency in 1996 by the same method of no-party elections. But last month Southwick blasted new legislation institutionalizing the system as "the functional equivalent of a one-party state." He is worried that the economically liberal President is moving toward political authoritarianism, making him "a bit dangerous" as a regional model.

Museveni called Southwick's noisy exit "rude." He is tired of the "shallowness" of Western thinking that demands that Uganda instantly model its politics on the U.S. "Unless you say all the societies in the whole world are uniform, then you cannot say their political management must be uniform," says Museveni. He believes Uganda has not "evolved" to the stage of development where multiparty democracy is possible or successful; it is still a preindustrial society that does not have enough of the well-off, well-educated middle class upon which Western democracy rests, so parties form along tribal, sectarian lines. Those are the divisions that have kept Uganda in a state of chaos for centuries, so multiparty elections "are not our concern," he says; modernization of the economy is. "That is what builds the middle class," says Museveni. "When you have that, the politics will eventually follow." While Museveni may be a gentler leader than his predecessors, critics say he is merely smarter at justifying authoritarian rule and making himself, not institutions, the country's core.

Museveni's utopian dream is to have African states working together. He supports an all-Africa fighting force that could step in, instead of U.N. troops. He works tirelessly to build roads, air links and trade routes across central Africa. He wants to remove tariffs and legal barriers to regional trade. He envisions "political cooperation, security cooperation, cultural cooperation." African people are all linked, he says. "We are not going to change our borders; we are going to transcend them. Why not a United States of Africa?"

That, in the end, is the heart of Museveni's message. "We are building Afrocentric, not Eurocentric, countries," he says, a continent where Africans deal with Africans. But the fragility of these ideas is still painfully evident even to Museveni. He stood at a hotel window in Kinshasa looking across the Congo river to Brazzaville, capital of the other country called the Congo. A prosperous, thriving nation just three months ago, that Congo has fallen back into mindless civil war, and as the latest cease-fire was broken, Museveni could see the bright red tracers of bullets arcing across the otherwise darkened city. "Clowns," he muttered. "Must Africa remain in a permanent state of transition?"

--Reported by Sally B. Donnelly/Washington, Peter Graff/Nairobi and Marguerite Michaels/Kampala

With reporting by SALLY B. DONNELLY/WASHINGTON, PETER GRAFF/NAIROBI AND MARGUERITE MICHAELS/KAMPALA