Julius Nyerere will be remembered as an African hero, the father of his nation and above all as a warm, friendly person. A man of charisma and charm. He was as much loved outside his own country as within. Throughout his life he occupied the moral high ground. He is renowned for his role as a mediator and peacemaker. The plaudits still ring for him and yet, his one unique project, his great economic experiment of ujamaa and collectivisation ended in failure. He took one step too far. He reached for the impossible and paid the price of failure. Alan Rake who knew him well in the early days gives a personal assessment.

I first met Julius Kambarage Nyerere in 1958. He was a dapper little man, dressed not in African robes but in a familiar, faded green bush shirt hanging outside his crumpled khaki trousers. The offices of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) were mud-walled, in a sand-blown location back street in Dar es Salaam. The rooms were dark and so small there was no place for the paperwork, which stacked in mountainous piles, spilled over onto the floor, smelling damp and musty. Inside political talk mingled with the clattering of typewriters, from dawn to dusk and on into the night. The political discussion seeped out of the sticky dampness of the Dar es Salaam air.

Nyerere was beaming at his desk. Warm. Welcoming. Always a charmer, to friend or foe alike. His was not just political popularity. He was not just the hero of the Tanganyika masses but beloved by people of all races and tribes. There was certainly none of the cynical criticism that surrounds most African politicians no matter how famous or dominant.

I soon became one of his friends. I liked to think there was a special bond between us, but everyone else who knew him claimed the same special friendship. I remember meeting him more than 20 years later at some cocktail party in London. The crowds were thick around him and I waited my moment to introduce myself.

"You won't remember me," I said

"Of course I remember you, Alan. Where have you been all this time?" He took my hand and held onto it far longer than he should have in a stiff British reception. But that was him all over. Always charming and unlike many others, he always meant it.

When I first met Nyerere, Tanganyika (not Tanzania, it had not even been invented) was still under British rule. It had suffered Arab slave traders in the nineteenth century followed by ferocious German occupation and civil wars in which hundreds of thousands of Tanganyikans had been killed. After the First World War, Tanganyika became a United Nations Trust Territory administered by Britain.

It was still a raw, poor and backward country and yet it was nearer to independence than its sophisticated neighbours in Kenya and Uganda. Kenya had fought a five-year civil war to win its independence but its white settlers were still fighting a rearguard action. Uganda had its warring politicians and the additional problems posed by the Kabaka of Buganda who wanted to preserve his monarchy.

Yet Tanganyika appeared to be far behind. Apart from its historical legacy it had its minorities - tens of thousands of Asians and a handful of influential whites. It was also far behind politically. In 1945 there was not a single African in the colonial legislative council. In 1957 there were still no elected members of any race.

But Tanganyika had a magic ingredient - a symbol of national unity in Julius Nyerere. Everyone assumed that he would lead his country to independence. It was only a question of when.

Nyerere was a Zanaki, one of the smallest of Tanganyika's 113 tribes. He had spent his youth as a herd boy, looking after his father's cattle. But when he went to school he turned out to be a brilliant scholar, gaining admission to the only secondary school in the country and then going on to Makerere, the University College of East Africa where he gained a teaching diploma.

There were no political parties in Tanganyika at that time. The Tanganyika African Association (TAA) had been founded by a group of colonial officers as a discussion forum for Africans. Nyerere became interested and organised a TAA branch while still a student at Makerere. Then he became the first African student to go to Britain, studying for a general arts degree at Edinburgh University.

He returned home to teach and become president of the TAA, but he only saw this as a stepping stone to the formation of a real party.

On the symbolic seventh day, of the seventh month: 7 July 1954 (saba saba day), he founded the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) and became its first president. Nyerere had virtually no opposition. There was only one other party, the Tanganyika African National Congress, led by a young man called Zuberi Mtemvu who had broken away from TANU. He fought on a militantly pro-Black platform. When it came to the first general election in September 1958, Mtemvu got 53 votes and lost his deposit.

Nyerere wanted independence by 1959 (next year) but how? The colonial government felt Africans "were not ready for it" and had set up a complicated system to protect minorities, in which Africans, Asians and Europeans had 10 seats each and every voter, no matter what his colour, had to vote for one person from each racial group. But the only way for Asians and Europeans to get the African vote was to support TANU. So even though there were 10 Europeans and 10 Asians, they all supported TANU!

Nyerere did not object to this as an interim measure "to reassure the minorities" but he insisted that soon all elections would be on a common roll, by universal adult suffrage with no distinction for race, tribe or creed.

Further elections were called in August 1960 on a more direct system when TANU gained 58 of the 71 seats. In October the country was given self-government and Nyerere emerged from solely being leader of TANU to become chief minister in the new government.

At the time he was so keen that Tanganyika should share its independence with its neighbours Kenya and Uganda that he volunteered to delay Tanganyikan independence while the others caught up but this was an idealistic dream. His people wanted independence and duly got it on 9 December 1961 with himself as premier. One month later, he extraordinarily resigned from the premiership to concentrate on reorganising the party and change it from battling against colonialism to become a force in building the new nation. What political insight!

Nyerere repeatedly told me that Tanganyika needed an opposition, but when he came to power he did not have one. No one else had found a way to stand against him. That was a measure of his political leadership. But for all his liberal education and friendly diplomatic character, it also led him to impose an intolerant one-party state. In successive elections he was returned as the only candidate for the presidency.

Like all the African rulers of his age, he claimed that he was only carrying out the wishes of his party, but in fact it was he who was imposing his will on the party and the country. His rule was absolute and he felt little compunction in crushing his political opponents with an ubiquitous Preventitive Detention Act similar to the acts imposed by the hated colonialists. Many political opponents were arrested and detained without trial. All the while he justified the system by saying that it was necessary in a developing country to rule for the good of the majority. Democracy was a luxury he could not afford. But Oscar Kambona, who fled abroad and a host of minor opponents, showed that he could not carry everyone along with him.

Shortly after he came to power he was to face real tests of his leadership. In December 1963 the offshore island of Zanzibar was given its independence. One month later the inexperienced Afro-Arab government was overthrown. Coup hysteria spread rapidly throughout East Africa. In Tanganyika, the Tanganyika Rifles mutinied and came near to toppling him. Nyerere went into hiding and was for a long time, apparently paralysed with indecision. He did not want to call in the old colonial power to rescue him, but he was frightened that the mutinous soldiers, who had ordered an arms shipment from the revolutionary Algerian regime, might oust him. Was this the first defect to show in Nyerere's character? Did he lack physical courage or was he just indecisive in a crisis?

Either way he was soon back dismissing the whole of the first battalion of the Tanganyika Rifles and forming a new peoples defence force in its place. Then came a political masterstroke, which turned the whole situation to his own advantage. He helped the Zanzibar politicians to retake power from the bloodstained regime of John Okello and join him in the United Republic of Tanzania with himself as president.

But Nyerere was never in total control in Zanzibar. Instead he found himself having to support the racist, male chauvinist and near illiterate Zanzibar ruler, Sheikh Abeid Karume who imposed a brutal dictatorship, arbitrarily killing political opponents and forcing young Arab girls, against their wishes to marry Africans much older than them "in the interests of racial integration". Karume was totally incompatible with the friendly, generous and outgoing Nyerere, but he had to live with the unsavoury character in the interests of short-term political expediency. Though Zanzibar gained political stability, it was at the cost of becoming an East German satellite state and later a secessionist thorn in Tanganyika's flesh.

Nyerere was not only an advocate of a single party state, but he followed all the other fashionable philosophies of his generation. He was foremost in helping the struggle against the apartheid government in South Africa, the colonialist government in Portuguese Africa and against the federal aspirations of Southern Rhodesia. He played a leading role in the Organisation of African Unity. Like the other African leaders, Nyerere also claimed he was an African socialist, and unlike most of them he probably was.

Throughout his life he was a man of simple tastes who accumulated little wealth during his long career. Nor did he pursue power for its own sake. He was one of the very few African presidents who voluntarily stood down from office though he knew that those who succeeded him had none of his charisma or qualities of leadership. He retired to his humble farm at Butiama and genuinely enjoyed farming and playing a part in rural life, though he was still in demand as a world statesman and mediator on a succession of African and international issues.

To Nyerere African socialism meant improving the health, education and living standards of the mass of the people. That meant the poorest living in the rural areas not just the towns. He saw that he could not eradicate poverty in his huge, undeveloped country with its burgeoning population by traditional capitalist methods. And he was not prepared to place Tanzania under the yoke of Soviet economic domination, so he looked for a third way. He thought Tanzania could do it on its own, by using co-operative self-help which concentrated on the rural farmer.

He actually invented a new concept - ujamaa (familyhood) in which people in the villages would boost agricultural production, primary education and medical services by self-help and co-operation. The idea was revolutionary and unparalleled in contemporary Africa. It was typical of Nyerere's high-flowing vision. Nyerere was able to embark on the ambitious scheme because he was receiving the highest level of per capita aid of any African country. He was the favourite son of the Scandanavian aid donors. Everyone wanted him to succeed and achieve an African miracle.

But ujamaa failed to deliver the goods. The Tanzanian farmers, like most farmers all over Africa, are entrepreneurs who want to work for themselves and their families, not for some remote community. They did not co-operate and production did not grow.

Nyerere found that he could not persuade the people into communal production so in desperation he turned to force. He imposed villagisation, attempting to uproot two million individual farmers and force them into villages where they would supposedly benefit by centralised services, advice and assistance. He went further forcing people to work in state farms, nationalising productive white farms and spoiling the flourishing coffee industry around Arusha.

It all failed! Motivation, infrastructure, training were all lacking. Tanzania ended poorer after the collectivisation experiment than it was before. But he succeeded in spreading primary education and medical care.

Nyerere recognised the failure of his grand experiment long before he finally stepped down from office in 1985. He and all the idealists (like myself) were shattered that the attempt to find a third African way of economic development had failed. The governments that followed had no alternative but to swallow the bitter IMF medicine and become part of the capitalist system.

But Nyerere himself was far from finished. He retired leaving his successors to see if they could revive the Tanzanian economy, but he would keep a watching role. When a few Tanzanians enriched themselves at the expense of the masses, when corruption flourished, when Tanzania became the dumping ground of cheap consumer goods, he would say privately, "I told you so".

He remained a power behind the scenes. Scarcely any decision by the new men or any appointment at the top was made without Nyerere's say so. And internationally his role remained as important as it ever was when he was in power. Until the very last when he died in a London hospital of leukaemia on 14 October 1999, he was in demand in Africa and the world as a mediator and negotiator.

He will be remembered as an African hero and as the beloved father of his nation.